With Christ in the School of Prayer

Andrew Murray

WITH CHRIST

IN THE SCHOOL OF PRAYER

Thoughts on Our Training

for the

Ministry of Intercession

 

BY

REV. ANDREW MURRAY

Lord, teach us to pray.

 

NEW YORKCHICAGOTORONTO

Fleming H. Revell Company

Publishers of Evangelical Literature.

00 - Preface

Andrew Murray

PREFACE.

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Of all the promises connected with the command, ‘ABIDE IN ME,’ there is none higher, and none that sooner brings the confession, ‘Not that I have already attained, or am already made perfect,’ than this: ‘If ye abide in me,  ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’    Power with God is the highest attainment of the life of full abiding.

And of all the traits of a life LIKE CHRIST there is none higher and more glorious than conformity to Him in the work that now engages Him without ceasing in the Father’s presence—His all-prevailing intercession.  The more we abide in Him, and grow unto His likeness, will His priestly life work in us mightily, and our life become what His is, a life that ever pleads and prevails for men.

‘Thou hast made us kings and priests unto God.’  Both in the king and the priest the chief thing is power, influence, blessing.  In the king it is vithe power coming downward; in the priest, the power rising upward, prevailing with God.  In our blessed Priest-King, Jesus Christ, the kingly power is founded on the priestly ‘He is able to save to the uttermost, because He ever liveth to make intercession.’  In us, His priests and kings, it is no otherwise:  it is in intercession that the Church is to find and wield its highest power, that each member of the Church is to prove his descent from Israel, who as a prince had power with God and with men, and prevailed.

It is under a deep impression that the place and power of prayer in the Christian life is too little understood, that this book has been written.  I feel sure that as long as we look on prayer chiefly as the means of maintaining our own Christian life, we shall not know fully what it is meant to be.  But when we learn to regard it as the highest part of the work entrusted to us, the root and strength of all other work, we shall see that there is nothing that we so need to study and practise as the art of praying aright.  If I have at all succeeded in pointing out the progressive teaching of our Lord in regard to prayer, and the distinct reference the wonderful promises of the last night (John xiv. 16viihave to the works we are to do in His Name, to the greater works, and to the bearing much fruit, we shall all admit that it is only when the Church gives herself up to this holy work of intercession that we can expect the power of Christ to manifest itself in her behalf.  It is my prayer that God may use this little book to make clearer to some of His children the wonderful place of power and influence which He is waiting for them to occupy, and for which a weary world is waiting too.

In connection with this there is another truth that has come to me with wonderful clearness as I studied the teaching of Jesus on prayer.  It is this:  that the Father waits to hear every prayer of faith, to give us whatsoever we will, and whatsoever we ask in Jesus’ name.  We have become so accustomed to limit the wonderful love and the large promises of our God, that we cannot read the simplest and clearest statements of our Lord without the qualifying clauses by which we guard and expound them.  If there is one thing I think the Church needs to learn, it is that God means prayer to have an answer, and that it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive what God will do for His child who gives himself to believe that his prayer will be viiiheard.   God hears prayer; this is a truth universally admitted, but of which very few understand the meaning, or experience the power.  If what I have written stir my reader to go to the Master’s words, and take His wondrous promises simply and literally as they stand, my object has been attained.

And then just one thing more.  Thousands have in these last years found an unspeakable blessing in learning how completely Christ is our life, and how He undertakes to be and to do all in us that we need.  I know not if we have yet learned to apply this truth to our prayer-life. Many complain that they have not the power to pray in faith, to pray the effectual prayer that availeth much.  The message I would fain bring them is that the blessed Jesus is waiting, is longing, to teach them this.  Christ is our life:  in heaven He ever liveth to pray; His life in us is an ever-praying life, if we will but trust Him for it.  Christ teaches us to pray not only by example, by instruction, by command, by promises, but by showing us HIMSELF, the ever-living Intercessor, as our Life.  It is when we believe this, and go and abide in Him for our prayer-life too, that our fears of not being able to pray aright will vanish, and we shall joyfully ixand triumphantly trust our Lord to teach us to pray, to be Himself the life and the power of our prayer. 

May God open our eyes to see what the holy ministry of intercession is to which, as His royal priesthood, we have been set apart.  May He give us a large and strong heart to believe what mighty influence our prayers can exert.  And may all fear as to our being able to fulfil our vocation vanish as we see Jesus, living ever to pray, living in us to pray, and standing surety for our prayer-life.

ANDREW MURRAY

WELLINGTON, 28th October 1895

01 - First Lesson. 'Lord, teach us to pray;' Or, The Only Teacher

Andrew Murray

FIRST LESSON.

‘Lord, teach us to pray;’

Or,    The Only Teacher .

 

‘And it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of His disciples said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray.’—Luke xi. 1.

 

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THE disciples had been with Christ, and seen Him pray.  They had learnt to understand something of the connection between His wondrous life in public, and His secret life of prayer.  They had learnt to believe in Him as a Master in the art of prayer—none could pray like Him.  And so they came to Him with the request, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’  And in after years they would have told us that there were few things more wonderful or blessed that He taught them than His lessons on prayer.

And now still it comes to pass, as He is praying in a certain place, that disciples who see Him thus engaged feel the need of repeating the same request, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’   As we grow in the Christian life, the thought and the faith of the Beloved Master in His never-failing intercession becomes ever 2more precious, and the hope of being Like Christ in His intercession gains an attractiveness before unknown.  And as we see Him pray, and remember that there is none who can pray like Him, and none who can teach like Him, we feel the petition of the disciples, ‘Lord, teach us to pray,’ is just what we need.  And as we think how all He is and has, how He Himself is our very own, how He is Himself our life, we feel assured that we have but to ask, and He will be delighted to take us up into closer fellowship with Himself, and teach us to pray even as He prays.

Come, my brothers!  Shall we not go to the Blessed Master and ask Him to enrol our names too anew in that school which He always keeps open for those who long to continue their studies in the Divine art of prayer and intercession?  Yes, let us this very day say to the Master, as they did of old, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’  As we meditate, we shall find each word of the petition we bring to be full of meaning.

‘Lord, teach us to pray.’  Yes, to pray.  This is what we need to be taught.  Though in its beginnings prayer is so simple that the feeblest child can pray, yet it is at the same time the highest and holiest work to which man can rise.   It is fellowship with the Unseen and Most Holy One.  The powers of the eternal world have been placed at its disposal.  It is the very essence of true religion, the channel of all blessings, the secret of power and life.  Not only for ourselves, but for others, 3for the Church, for the world, it is to prayer that God has given the right to take hold of Him and His strength.  It is on prayer that the promises wait for their fulfilment, the kingdom for its coming, the glory of God for its full revelation.  And for this blessed work, how slothful and unfit we are.  It is only the Spirit of God can enable us to do it aright.  How speedily we are deceived into a resting in the form, while the power is wanting.  Our early training, the teaching of the Church, the influence of habit, the stirring of the emotions—how easily these lead to prayer which has no spiritual power, and avails but little.  True prayer, that takes hold of God’s strength, that availeth much, to which the gates of heaven are really opened wide—who would not cry, Oh for some one to teach me thus to pray?

Jesus has opened a school, in which He trains His redeemed ones, who specially desire it, to have power in prayer.  Shall we not enter it with the petition, Lord! it is just this we need to be taught! O teach us to pray.

‘Lord, teach us to pray.’  Yes, us, Lord.  We have read in Thy Word with what power Thy believing people of old used to pray, and what mighty wonders were done in answer to their prayers.  And if this took place under the Old Covenant, in the time of preparation, how much more wilt Thou not now, in these days of fulfilment, give Thy people this sure sign of Thy presence in their midst.  We have heard the promises given to Thine apostles of the power of prayer in Thy 4name, and have seen how gloriously they experienced their truth:  we know for certain, they can become true to us too.  We hear continually even in these days what glorious tokens of Thy power Thou dost still give to those who trust Thee fully.  Lord! these all are men of like passions with ourselves; teach us to pray so too.  The promises are for us, the powers and gifts of the heavenly world are for us.  O teach us to pray so that we may receive abundantly.  To us too Thou hast entrusted Thy work, on our prayer too the coming of Thy kingdom depends, in our prayer too Thou canst glorify Thy name; ‘Lord teach us to pray.’  Yes, us, Lord; we offer ourselves as learners; we would indeed be taught of Thee.  ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’

‘Lord, teach us to pray.’  Yes, we feel the need now of being taught to pray.  At first there is no work appears so simple; later on, none that is more difficult; and the confession is forced from us:  We know not how to pray as we ought.  It is true we have God’s Word, with its clear and sure promises; but sin has so darkened our mind, that we know not always how to apply the word.  In spiritual things we do not always seek the most needful things, or fail in praying according to the law of the sanctuary.  In temporal things we are still less able to avail ourselves of the wonderful liberty our Father has given us to ask what we need.  And even when we know what to ask, how much there is still needed to make prayer acceptable.  It must be to the glory of God, in full surrender to His will, in full assurance 5of faith, in the name of Jesus, and with a perseverance that, if need be, refuses to be denied.  All this must be learned.  It can only be learned in the school of much prayer, for practice makes perfect.  Amid the painful consciousness of ignorance and unworthiness, in the struggle between believing and doubting, the heavenly art of effectual prayer is learnt.  Because, even when we do not remember it, there is One, the Beginner and Finisher of faith and prayer, who watches over our praying, and sees to it that in all who trust Him for ittheir education in the school of prayer shall be carried on to perfection.  Let but the deep undertone of all our prayer be the teachableness that comes from a sense of ignorance, and from faith in Him as a perfect teacher, and we may be sure we shall be taught, we shall learn to pray in power.  Yes, we may depend upon it, He teachesto pray.

Lord, teach us to pray.’  None can teach like Jesus, none but Jesus; therefore we call on Him, ‘LORD, teach us to pray.’  A pupil needs a teacher, who knows his work, who has the gift of teaching, who in patience and love will descend to the pupil’s needs.  Blessed be God!  Jesus is all this and much more.  He knows what prayer is.  It is Jesus, praying Himself, who teaches to pray.  He knows what prayer is.  He learned it amid the trials and tears of His earthly life.  In heaven it is still His beloved work:  His life there is prayer.  Nothing delights Him more than to find those 6whom He can take with Him into the Father’s presence, whom He can clothe with power to pray down God’s blessing on those around them, whom He can train to be His fellow-workers in the intercession by which the kingdom is to be revealed on earth.  He knows how to teach.  Now by the urgency of felt need, then by the confidence with which joy inspires.  Here by the teaching of the Word, there by the testimony of another believer who knows what it is to have prayer heard.  By His Holy Spirit, He has access to our heart, and teaches us to pray by showing us the sin that hinders the prayer, or giving us the assurance that we please God.  He teaches, by giving not only thoughts of what to ask or how to ask, but by breathing within us the very spirit of prayer, by living within us as the Great Intercessor.  We may indeed and most joyfully say, ‘Who teacheth like Him?’  Jesus never taught His disciples how to preach, only how to pray.  He did not speak much of what was needed to preach well, but much of praying well.  To know how to speak to God is more than knowing how to speak to man.  Not power with men, but power with God is the first thing.  Jesus loves to teach us how to pray.

What think you, my beloved fellow-disciples! would it not be just what we need, to ask the Master for a month to give us a course of special lessons on the art of prayer?  As we meditate on the words He spake on earth, let us yield ourselves to His teaching in the fullest confidence that, with such a teacher, we shall make progress.  Let us take time not only to meditate, but to pray, to tarry at the foot of the 7throne, and be trained to the work of intercession.  Let us do so in the assurance that amidst our stammerings and fears He is carrying on His work most beautifully.  He will breathe His own life, which is all prayer, into us.  As He makes us partakers of His righteousness and His life, He will of His intercession too.  As the members of His body, as a holy priesthood, we shall take part in His priestly work of pleading and prevailing with God for men.  Yes, let us most joyfully say, ignorant and feeble though we be, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

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Blessed Lord! who ever livest to pray, Thou canst teach me too to pray, me too to live ever to pray.  In this Thou lovest to make me share Thy glory in heaven, that I should pray without ceasing, and ever stand as a priest in the presence of my God.

Lord Jesus!   I ask Thee this day to enrol my name among those who confess that they know not how to pray as they ought, and specially ask Thee for a course of teaching in prayer.  Lord! teach me to tarry with Thee in the school, and give Thee time to train me.  May a deep sense of my ignorance, of the wonderful privilege and power of prayer, of the need of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of prayer, lead me to cast away my thoughts of what I think I know, and make me kneel before Thee in true teachableness and poverty of spirit.

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And fill me, Lord, with the confidence that with such a teacher as Thou art I shall learn to pray.  In the assurance that I have as my teacher, Jesus who is ever praying to the Father, and by His prayer rules the destinies of His Church and the world, I will not be afraid.  As much as I need to know of the mysteries of the prayer-world, Thou wilt unfold for me.  And when I may not know, Thou wilt teach me to be strong in faith, giving glory to God.

Blessed Lord! Thou wilt not put to shame Thy scholar who trusts Thee, nor, by Thy grace, would he Thee either.  Amen. 

02 - Second Lesson. 'In spirit and truth;' Or, The True Worshippers

Andrew Murray

SECOND LESSON.

‘In spirit and truth.’

Or,    The True Worshippers.

‘The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth:  for such doth the Father seek to be His worshippers.  God is a Spirit:  and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth.’—John iv. 23, 24.

 

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THESE words of Jesus to the woman of Samaria are His first recorded teaching on the subject of prayer.  They give us some wonderful first glimpses into the world of prayer.  The Father seeks worshippers:  our worship satisfies His loving heart and is a joy to Him.  He seeks true worshippers, but finds many not such as He would have them.  True worship is that which is in spirit and truth.  The Son has come to open the way for this worship in spirit and in truth, and teach it us.  And so one of our first lessons in the school of prayer must be to understand what it is to pray in spirit and in truth, and to know how we can attain to it.

To the woman of Samaria our Lord spoke of a threefold worship.  There is first, the ignorant 10worship of the Samaritans:  ‘Ye worship that which ye know not.’  The second, the intelligent worship of the Jew, having the true knowledge of God: ‘We worship that which we know; for salvation is of the Jews.’  And then the new, the spiritual worship which He Himself has come to introduce:  ‘The hour is coming, and is now, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth.’  From the connection it is evident that the words ‘in spirit and truth’ do not mean, as is often thought, earnestly, from the heart, in sincerity.  The Samaritans had the five books of Moses and some knowledge of God; there was doubtless more than one among them who honestly and earnestly sought God in prayer.  The Jews had the true full revelation of God in His word, as thus far given; there were among them godly men, who called upon God with their whole heart.  And yet not ‘in spirit and truth,’ in the full meaning of the words.  Jesus says, ‘The hour is coming, and now is;’ it is only in and through Him that the worship of God will be in spirit and truth.

Among Christians one still finds the three classes of worshippers.  Some who in their ignorance hardly know what they ask:  they pray earnestly, and yet receive but little.  Others there are, who have more correct knowledge, who try to pray with all their mind and heart, and often pray most earnestly, and yet do not attain to the full blessedness of worship in spirit and truth.  It is into this third class we must ask our Lord Jesus to take us; we must be taught of Him how to worship in 11spirit and truth.  This alone is spiritual worship; this makes us worshippers such as the Father seeks.  In prayer everything will depend on our understanding well and practising the worship in spirit and truth.

‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and truth.’  The first thought suggested here by the Master is that there must be harmony between God and His worshippers; such as God is, must His worship be.  This is according to a principle which prevails throughout the universe:  we look for correspondence between an object and the organ to which it reveals or yields itself.  The eye has an inner fitness for the light, the ear for sound.  The man who would truly worship God, would find and know and possess and enjoy God, must be in harmony with Him, must have the capacity for receiving Him.  Because God is Spirit, we must worship in spirit.  As God is, so His worshipper.

And what does this mean?  The woman had asked our Lord whether Samaria or Jerusalem was the true place of worship.  He answers that henceforth worship is no longer to be limited to a certain place:  ‘Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father.’  As God is Spirit, not bound by space or time, but in His infinite perfection always and everywhere the same, so His worship would henceforth no longer be confined by place or form, but spiritual as God Himself is spiritual.  12A lesson of deep importance.  How much our Christianity suffers from this, that it is confined to certain times and places.  A man, who seeks to pray earnestly in the church or in the closet, spends the greater part of the week or the day in a spirit entirely at variance with that in which he prayed.  His worship was the work of a fixed place or hour, not of his whole being.  God is a Spirit:  He is the Everlasting and Unchangeable One; what He is, He is always and in truth.  Our worship must even so be in spirit and truth:  His worship must be the spirit of our life; our life must be worship in spirit as God is Spirit.

‘God is a Spirit:  and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth.’  The second thought that comes to us is that the worship in the spirit must come from God Himself.  God is Spirit:  He alone has Spirit to give.  It was for this He sent His Son, to fit us for such spiritual worship, by giving us the Holy Spirit.  It is of His own work that Jesus speaks when He says twice, ‘The hour cometh,’ and then adds, ‘and is now.’  He came to baptize with the Holy Spirit; the Spirit could not stream forth till He was glorified (John i. 33, vii. 37, 38, xvi. 7).  It was when He had made an end of sin, and entering into the Holiest of all with His blood, had there on our behalf received the Holy Spirit (Acts ii. 33), that He could send Him down to us as the Spirit of the Father.  It was when Christ had redeemed us, and we in Him had received the position of children, that the Father sent forth the Spirit of His Son13 into our hearts to cry, ‘Abba, Father.’  The worship in spirit is the worship of the Father in the Spirit of Christ , the Spirit of Sonship.

This is the reason why Jesus here uses the name of Father.  We never find one of the Old Testament saints personally appropriate the name of child or call God his Father.  The worship of the Father is only possible to those to whom the Spirit of the Son has been given.  The worship inspirit is only possible to those to whom the Son has revealed the Father, and who have received the spirit of Sonship.  It is only Christ who opens the way and teaches the worship in spirit.

And in truth.  That does not only mean, in sincerity.  Nor does it only signify, in accordance with the truth of God’s Word.  The expression is one of deep and Divine meaning.  Jesus is ‘the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.’  ‘The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.’  Jesus says, ‘I am the truth and the life.’  In the Old Testament all was shadow and promise; Jesus brought and gives the reality, the substance, of things hoped for.  In Him the blessings and powers of the eternal life are our actual possession and experience.  Jesus is full of grace and truth; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth; through Him the grace that is in Jesus is ours in deed and truth, a positive communication out of the Divine life.  And so worship in spirit is worship in truth; actual living fellowship with God, 14a real correspondence and harmony between the Father, who is a Spirit, and the child praying in the spirit.

What Jesus said to the woman of Samaria, she could not at once understand.  Pentecost was needed to reveal its full meaning.  We are hardly prepared at our first entrance into the school of prayer to grasp such teaching.  We shall understand it better later on.  Let us only begin and take the lesson as He gives it.  We are carnal and cannot bring God the worship He seeks.  But Jesus came to give the Spirit:  He has given Him to us.  Let the disposition in which we set ourselves to pray be what Christ’s words have taught us.  Let there be the deep confession of our inability to bring God the worship that is pleasing to Him; the childlike teachableness that waits on Him to instruct us; the simple faith that yields itself to the breathing of the Spirit.  Above all, let us hold fast the blessed truth—we shall find that the Lord has more to say to us about it—that the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God, the revelation of His infinite Fatherliness in our hearts, the faith in the infinite love that gives us His Son and His Spirit to make us children, is indeed the secret of prayer in spirit and truth.  This is the new and living way Christ opened up for us.  To have Christ the Son, and the Spirit of the Son, dwelling within us, and revealing the Father, this makes us true, spiritual worshippers.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

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Blessed Lord!  I adore the love with which Thou didst teach a woman, who had refused Thee a cup of water, what the worship of God must be.  I rejoice in the assurance that Thou wilt no less now instruct Thy disciple, who comes to Thee with a heart that longs to pray in spirit and in truth.  O my Holy Master!  do teach me this blessed secret.

Teach me that the worship in spirit and truth is not of man, but only comes from Thee; that it is not only a thing of times and seasons, but the outflowing of a life in Thee.  Teach me to draw near to God in prayer under the deep impression of my ignorance and my having nothing in myself to offer Him, and at the same time of the provision Thou, my Saviour, makest for the Spirit’s breathing in my childlike stammerings.  I do bless Thee that in Thee I am a child, and have a child’s liberty of access; that in Thee I have the spirit of Sonship and of worship in truth.  Teach me, above all, Blessed Son of the Father, how it is the revelation of the Father that gives confidence in prayer; and let the infinite Fatherliness of God’s Heart be my joy and strength for a life of prayer and ofworship.  Amen.

03 - Third Lesson. 'Pray to thy Father, which is in secret;' Or, Alone with God

Andrew Murray

THIRD LESSON.

‘Pray to thy Father, which is in secret;’

Or,    Alone with God.

 

‘But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall recompense thee’—Matt. vi. 6.

 

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AFTER Jesus had called His first disciples, He gave them their first public teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.  He there expounded to them the kingdom of God, its laws and its life.  In that kingdom God is not only King, but Father, He not only gives all, but is Himself all.  In the knowledge and fellowship of Him alone is its blessedness.  Hence it came as a matter of course that the revelation of prayer and the prayer-life was a part of His teaching concerning the New Kingdom He came to set up.  Moses gave neither command nor regulation with regard to prayer:  even the prophets say little directly of the duty of prayer; it is Christ who teaches to pray.

And the first thing the Lord teaches His disciples 17is that they must have a secret place for prayer; every one must have some solitary spot where he can be alone with his God.  Every teacher must have a schoolroom.  We have learnt to know and accept Jesus as our only teacher in the school of prayer.  He has already taught us at Samaria that worship is no longer confined to times and places; that worship, spiritual true worship, is a thing of the spirit and the life; the whole man must in his whole life be worship in spirit and truth.  And yet He wants each one to choose for himself the fixed spot where He can daily meet him.  That inner chamber, that solitary place, is Jesus’ schoolroom.  That spot may be anywhere; that spot may change from day to day if we have to change our abode; but that secret place there must be, with the quiet time in which the pupil places himself in the Master’s presence, to be by Him prepared to worship the Father.  There alone, but there most surely, Jesus comes to us to teach us to pray.

A teacher is always anxious that his schoolroom should be bright and attractive, filled with the light and air of heaven, a place where pupils long to come, and love to stay.  In His first words on prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seeks to set the inner chamber before us in its most attractive light.  If we listen carefully, we soon notice what the chief thing is He has to tell us of our tarrying there.  Three times He uses the name of Father:  ‘Pray to thy Father;’  ‘Thy Father shall recompense thee;’ ‘Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of.’  18The first thing in closet-prayer is:  I must meet my Father.  The light that shines in the closet must be:  the light of the Father’s countenance.  The fresh air from heaven with which Jesus would have it filled, the atmosphere in which I am to breathe and pray, is:  God’s Father-love, God’s infinite Fatherliness.  Thus each thought or petition we breathe out will be simple, hearty, childlike trust in the Father.  This is how the Master teaches us to pray:  He brings us into the Father’s living presence.  What we pray there must avail.  Let us listen carefully to hear what the Lord has to say to us.

First, ‘Pray to thy Father which is in secret.’  God is a God who hides Himself to the carnal eye.  As long as in our worship of God we are chiefly occupied with our own thoughts and exercises, we shall not meet Him who is a Spirit, the unseen One.  But to the man who withdraws himself from all that is of the world and man, and prepares to wait upon God alone, the Father will reveal Himself.  As he forsakes and gives up and shuts out the world, and the life of the world, and surrenders himself to be led of Christ into the secret of God’s presence, the light of the Father’s love will rise upon him.  The secrecy of the inner chamber and the closed door, the entire separation from all around us, is an image of, and so a help to that inner spiritual sanctuary, the secret of God’s tabernacle, within the veil, where our spirit truly comes into contact with the Invisible One.  And so we are 19taught, at the very outset of our search after the secret of effectual prayer, to remember that it is in the inner chamber, where we are alone with the Father, that we shall learn to pray aright.  The Father is in secret:  in these words Jesus teaches us where He is waiting us, where He is always to be found.  Christians often complain that private prayer is not what it should be.  They feel weak and sinful, the heart is cold and dark; it is as if they have so little to pray, and in that little no faith or joy.  They are discouraged and kept from prayer by the thought that they cannot come to the Father as they ought or as they wish.  Child of God!  listen to your Teacher.  He tells you that when you go to private prayer your first thought must be:  The Father is in secret, the Father waits me there.  Just because your heart is cold and prayerless, get you into the presence of the loving Father.  As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth you.  Do not be thinking of how little you have to bring God, but of how much He wants to give you.  Just place yourself before, and look up into, His face; think of His love, His wonderful, tender, pitying love.  Just tell Him how sinful and cold and dark all is:  it is the Father’s loving heart will give light and warmth to yours.  O do what Jesus says:  Just shut the door, and pray to thy Father which is in secret.  Is it not wonderful?  to be able to go alone with God, the infinite God.  And then to look up and say:  My Father!

And thy Father, which seeth in secret, will recompense thee.’  Here Jesus assures us that secret 20prayer cannot be fruitless:  its blessing will show itself in our life.  We have but in secret, alone with God, to entrust our life before men to Him; He will reward us openly; He will see to it that the answer to prayer be made manifest in His blessing upon us.  Our Lord would thus teach us that as infinite Fatherliness and Faithfulness is that with which God meets us in secret, so on our part there should be the childlike simplicity of faith, the confidence that our prayer does bring down a blessing.  ‘He that cometh to God must believe that He is a rewarder of them that seek Him.’  Not on the strong or the fervent feeling with which I pray does the blessing of the closet depend, but upon the love and the power of the Father to whom I there entrust my needs.  And therefore the Master has but one desire:  Remember your Father is, and sees and hears in secret; go there and stay there, and go again from there in the confidence:  He will recompense.  Trust Him for it; depend upon Him:  prayer to the Father cannot be vain; He will reward you openly.

Still further to confirm this faith in the Father-love of God, Christ speaks a third word:  ‘Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him.’  At first sight it might appear as if this thought made prayer less needful:  God knows far better than we what we need.  But as we get a deeper insight into what prayer really is, this truth will help much to strengthen our faith.  It will teach us that we do not need, as the heathen, with the multitude and urgency of our words, to compel an21unwilling God to listen to us.  It will lead to a holy thoughtfulness and silence in prayer as it suggests the question:  Does my Father really know that I need this?  It will, when once we have been led by the Spirit to the certainty that our request is indeed something that, according to the Word, we do need for God’s glory, give us wonderful confidence to say, My Father knows I need it and must have it.  And if there be any delay in the answer, it will teach us in quiet perseverance to hold on:  FATHER!  THOU KNOWEST I need it.  O the blessed liberty and simplicity of a child that Christ our Teacher would fain cultivate in us, as we draw near to God:  let us look up to the Father until His Spirit works it in us.  Let us sometimes in our prayers, when we are in danger of being so occupied with our fervent, urgent petitions, as to forget that the Father knows and hears, let us hold still and just quietly say:  My Father sees, my Father hears, my Father knows; it will help our faith to take the answer, and to say:  We know that we have the petitions we have asked of Him.

And now, all ye who have anew entered the school of Christ to be taught to pray, take these lessons, practise them, and trust Him to perfect you in them.  Dwell much in the inner chamber, with the door shut—shut in from men, shut up with God; it is there the Father waits you, it is there Jesus will teach you to pray.  To be alone in secret with THE FATHER:  this be your highest joy.  To be assured that THE FATHER will openly reward the 22secret prayer, so that it cannot remain unblessed:  this be your strength day by day.  And to know that THE FATHER knows that you need what you ask;  this be your liberty to bring every need, in the assurance that your God will supply it according to His riches in Glory in Christ Jesus.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

Blessed Saviour!  with my whole heart I do bless Thee for the appointment of the inner chamber, as the school where Thou meetest each of Thy pupils alone, and revealest to him the Father.  O my Lord!  strengthen my faith so in the Father’s tender love and kindness, that as often as I feel sinful or troubled, the first instinctive thought may be to go where I know the Father waits me, and where prayer never can go unblessed.  Let the thought that He knows my need before I ask, bring me, in great restfulness of faith, to trust that He will give what His child requires.  O let the place of secret prayer become to me the most beloved spot of earth.

And, Lord!  hear me as I pray that Thou wouldest everywhere bless the closets of Thy believing people.  Let Thy wonderful revelation of a Father’s tenderness free all young Christians from every thought of secret prayer as a duty or a burden, and lead them to regard it as the highest privilege of their life, a joy and a blessing.  Bring back all who are discouraged, because they cannot find ought to bring 23Thee in prayer.  O give them to understand that they have only to come with their emptiness to Him who has all to give, and delights to do it.  Not, what they have to bring the Father, but what the Father waits to give them, be their one thought.

And bless especially the inner chamber of all Thy servants who are working for Thee, as the place where God’s truth and God’s grace is revealed to them, where they are daily anointed with fresh oil, where their strength is renewed, and the blessings are received in faith, with which they are to bless their fellow-men.  Lord, draw us all in the closet nearer to Thyself and the Father.  Amen.

04 - Fourth Lesson. 'After this manner pray;' Or, The Model Prayer

Andrew Murray

FOURTH LESSON

‘After this manner pray;’

Or,    The Model Prayer.

 

‘After this manner therefore pray ye:  Our Father which art in heaven.’—Matt. vi. 9.

 

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EVERY teacher knows the power of example.  He not only tells the child what to do and how to do it, but shows him how it really can be done.  In condescension to our weakness, our heavenly Teacher has given us the very words we are to take with us as we draw near to our Father.  We have in them a form of prayer in which there breathe the freshness and fulness of the Eternal Life.  So simple that the child can lisp it, so divinely rich that it comprehends all that God can give.  A form of prayer that becomes the model and inspiration for all other prayer, and yet always draws us back to itself as the deepest utterance of our souls before our God.

Our Father which art in heaven!’  To appreciate this word of adoration aright, I must remember that none of the saints had in Scripture ever ventured to address God as their Father.  The 25invocation places us at once in the centre of the wonderful revelation the Son came to make of His Father as our Father too.  It comprehends the mystery of redemption—Christ delivering us from the curse that we might become the children of God.  The mystery of regeneration—the Spirit in the new birth giving us the new life.  And the mystery of faith—ere yet the redemption is accomplished or understood, the word is given on the lips of the disciples to prepare them for the blessed experience still to come.  The words are the key to the whole prayer, to all prayer.  It takes time, it takes life to study them; it will take eternity to understand them fully.  The knowledge of God’s Father-love is the first and simplest, but also the last and highest lesson in the school of prayer.  It is in the personal relation to the living God, and the personal conscious fellowship of love with Himself, that prayer begins.  It is in the knowledge of God’s Fatherliness, revealed by the Holy Spirit, that the power of prayer will be found to root and grow.  In the infinite tenderness and pity and patience of the infinite Father, in His loving readiness to hear and to help, the life of prayer has its joy.  O let us take time, until the Spirit has made these words to us spirit and truth, filling heart and life:  ‘Our Father which art in heaven.’  Then we are indeed within the veil, in the secret place of power where prayer always prevails.

 ‘Hallowed be Thy name.’  There is something here that strikes us at once.  While we ordinarily first 26bring our own needs to God in prayer, and then think of what belongs to God and His interests, the Master reverses the order.  First, Thy 27name, Thy kingdom, Thy will; then, give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us.  The lesson is of more importance than we think.  In true worship the Father must be first, must be all.  The sooner I learn to forget myself in the desire that HE may be glorified, the richer will the blessing be that prayer will bring to myself.  No one ever loses by what he sacrifices for the Father.

This must influence all our prayer.  There are two sorts of prayer:  personal and intercessory.  The latter ordinarily occupies the lesser part of our time and energy.  This may not be.  Christ has opened the school of prayer specially to train intercessors for the great work of bringing down, by their faith and prayer, the blessings of His work and love on the world around.  There can be no deep growth in prayer unless this be made our aim.  The little child may ask of the father only what it needs for itself; and yet it soon learns to say, Give some for sister too.  But the grown-up son, who only lives for the father’s interest and takes charge of the father’s business, asks more largely, and gets all that is asked.  And Jesus would train us to the blessed life of consecration and service, in which our interests are all subordinate to the Name, and the Kingdom, and the Will of the Father.  O let us live for this, and let, on each act of adoration, Our Father! there follow in the same breath Thy Name, Thy Kingdom, ThyWill;—for this we look up and long.

Hallowed be Thy name.’  What name?  This new name of Father.  The word Holy is the central word of the Old Testament; the name Father of the New.  In this name of Love all the holiness and glory of God are now to be revealed.  And how is the name to be hallowed?  By God Himself:  ‘I will hallow My great name which ye have profaned.’  Our prayer must be that in ourselves, in all God’s children, in presence of the world, God Himself would reveal the holiness, the Divine power, the hidden glory of the name of Father.  The Spirit of the Father is the Holy Spirit:  it is only when we yield ourselves to be led of Him, that the name will be hallowed in our prayers and our lives.  Let us learn the prayer:  ‘Our Father, hallowed be Thy name.’

Thy kingdom come.’  The Father is a King and has a kingdom.  The son and heir of a king has no higher ambition than the glory of his father’s kingdom.  In time of war or danger this becomes his passion; he can think of nothing else.  The children of the Father are here in the enemy’s territory, where the kingdom, which is in heaven, is not yet fully manifested.  What more natural than that, when they learn to hallow the Father-name, they should long and cry with deep enthusiasm:  ‘Thy kingdom come.’  The coming of the kingdom is the one great event on which the revelation of the Father’s glory, the blessedness of His children, the salvation of the28world depends.  On our prayers too the coming of the kingdom waits.  Shall we not join in the deep longing cry of the redeemed:  ‘Thy kingdom come’?  Let us learn it in the school of Jesus.

Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.’  This petition is too frequently applied alone to the suffering  of the will of God.  In heaven God’s will is done, and the Master teaches the child to ask that the will may be done on earth just as in heaven:  in the spirit of adoring submission and ready obedience.  Because the will of God is the glory of heaven, the doing of it is the blessedness of heaven.  As the will is done, the kingdom of heaven comes into the heart.  And wherever faith has accepted the Father’s love, obedience accepts the Father’s will.  The surrender to, and the prayer for a life of heaven-like obedience, is the spirit of childlike prayer.

Give us this day our daily bread.’  When first the child has yielded himself to the Father in the care for His Name, His Kingdom, and His Will, he has full liberty to ask for his daily bread.  A master cares for the food of his servant, a general of his soldiers, a father of his child.  And will not the Father in heaven care for the child who has in prayer given himself up to His interests?  We may indeed in full confidence say:  Father, I live for Thy honour and Thy work; I know Thou carest for me.  Consecration to God and His will gives wonderful liberty in prayer for temporal things:  the whole earthly life is given to the Father’s loving care.

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And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.’  As bread is the first need of the body, so forgiveness for the soul.  And the provision for the one is as sure as for the other.  We are children but sinners too; our right of access to the Father’s presence we owe to the precious blood and the forgiveness it has won for us.  Let us beware of the prayer for forgiveness becoming a formality:  only what is really confessed is really forgiven.  Let us in faith accept the forgiveness as promised:  as a spiritual reality, an actual transaction between God and us, it is the entrance into all the Father’s love and all the privileges of children.  Such forgiveness, as a living experience, is impossible without a forgiving spirit to others:  as forgiven expresses the heavenward, so forgiving the earthward, relation of God’s child.  In each prayer to the Father I must be able to say that I know of no one whom I do not heartily love.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’  Our daily bread, the pardon of our sins, and then our being kept from all sin and the power of the evil one, in these three petitions all our personal need is comprehended.  The prayer for bread and pardon must be accompanied by the surrender to live in all things in holy obedience to the Father’s will, and the believing prayer in everything to be kept by the power of the indwelling Spirit from the power of the evil one.

Children of God! it is thus Jesus would have us to pray to the Father in heaven.  O let His Name, and Kingdom, and Will, have the first place in our 30love; His providing, and pardoning, and keeping love will be our sure portion.  So the prayer will lead us up to the true child-life:  the Father all to the child, the Father all for the child.  We shall understand how Father and child, the Thine and the Our, are all one, and how the heart that begins its prayer with the God-devoted THINE, will have the power in faith to speak out the OUR too.  Such prayer will, indeed, be the fellowship and interchange of love, always bringing us back in trust and worship to Him who is not only the Beginning but the End:  ‘FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM, AND THE POWER, AND THE GLORY, FOR EVER, AMEN.’  Son of the Father, teach us to pray, ‘OUR FATHER.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

O Thou who art the only-begotten Son, teach us, we beseech Thee, to pray, ‘OUR FATHER.’  We thank Thee, Lord, for these Living Blessed Words which Thou has given us.  We thank Thee for the millions who in them have learnt to know and worship the Father, and for what they have been to us.  Lord! it is as if we needed days and weeks in Thy school with each separate petition; so deep and full are they.  But we look to Thee to lead us deeper into their meaning:  do it, we pray Thee, for Thy Name’s sake; Thy name is Son of the Father.

Lord!  Thou didst once say:  ‘No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal Him.’  And again:  ‘I made known 31unto them Thy name, and will make it known, that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them.’  Lord Jesus! reveal to us the Father.  Let His name, His infinite Father-love, the love with which He loved Thee, according to Thy prayer, BE IN US.  Then shall we say aright, ‘OUR FATHER!’  Then shall we apprehend Thy teaching, and the first spontaneous breathing of our heart will be:  ‘Our Father, Thy Name, Thy Kingdom, Thy Will.’  And we shall bring our needs and our sins and our temptations to Him in the confidence that the love of such a Father care for all.

Blessed Lord! we are Thy scholars, we trust Thee; do teach us to pray, ‘OUR FATHER.’  Amen.

05 - Fifth Lesson. 'Ask, and it shall be given you;' Or, The Certainty of the Answer to Prayer

Andrew Murray

FIFTH LESSON.

'Ask, and it shall be given you'

Or,    The Certainty of the Answer to Prayer.

 

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:  for every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened,’Matt. vii. 7, 8.

‘Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss.’—Jas. iv. 3.

 

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OUR Lord returns here in the Sermon on the Mount a second time to speak of prayer.  The first time He had spoken of the Father who is to be found in secret, and rewards openly, and had given us the pattern prayer (Matt. vi. 5-15).  Here He wants to teach us what in all Scripture is considered the chief thing in prayer:  the assurance that prayer will be heard and answered.  Observe how He uses words which mean almost the same thing, and each time repeats the promise so distinctly:  ‘Ye shall receive, ye shall find, it shall be opened unto you;’ and then gives as ground for such assurance the law of the kingdom:  ‘He that asketh, receiveth; he that seeketh, findeth; to him that33knocketh, it shall be opened.’  We cannot but feel how in this sixfold repetition He wants to impress deep on our minds this one truth, that we may and must most confidently expect an answer to our prayer.  Next to the revelation of the Father’s love, there is, in the whole course of the school of prayer, not a more important lesson than this:  Every one that asketh, receiveth.

In the three words the Lord uses, ask, seek, knock, a difference in meaning has been sought.  If such was indeed His purpose, then the first, ASK, refers to the gifts we pray for.  But I may ask and receive the gift without the Giver.  SEEK is the word Scripture uses of God Himself; Christ assures me that I can find Himself.  But it is not enough to find God in time of need, without coming to abiding fellowship:  KNOCK speaks of admission to dwell with Him and in Him.  Asking and receiving the gift would thus lead to seeking and finding the Giver, and this again to the knocking and opening of the door of the Father’s home and love.  One thing is sure:  the Lord does want us to count most certainly on it that asking, seeking, knocking, cannot be in vain:  receiving an answer, finding God, the opened heart and home of God, are the certain fruit of prayer.

That the Lord should have thought it needful in so many forms to repeat the truth, is a lesson of deep import.  It proves that He knows our heart, how doubt and distrust toward God are natural to us, and how easily we are inclined to rest in prayer as a 34religious work without an answer.  He knows too how, even when we believe that God is the Hearer of prayer, believing prayer that lays hold of the promise, is something spiritual, too high and difficult for the half-hearted disciple.  He therefore at the very outset of His instruction to those who would learn to pray, seeks to lodge this truth deep into their hearts:  prayer does avail much; ask and ye shall receive; every one that asketh, receiveth.  This is the fixed eternal law of the kingdom:  if you ask and receive not, it must be because there is something amiss or wanting in the prayer.  Hold on; let the Word and the Spirit teach you to pray aright, but do not let go the confidence He seeks to waken:  Every one that asketh, receiveth.

Ask, and it shall be given you.’  Christ has no mightier stimulus to persevering prayer in His school than this.  As a child has to prove a sum to be correct, so the proof that we have prayed aright is, the answer.  If we ask and receive not, it is because we have not learned to pray aright.  Let every learner in the school of Christ therefore take the Master’s word in all simplicity:  Every one that asketh, receiveth.  He had good reasons for speaking so unconditionally.  Let us beware of weakening the Word with our human wisdom.  When He tells us heavenly things, let us believe Him:  His Word will explain itself to him who believes it fully.  If questions and difficulties arise, let us not seek to have them settled before we accept the Word.  No; let us entrust them all to Him:  it is His to solve them:  our work is first and fully to accept and hold 35fast His promise.  Let in our inner chamber, in the inner chamber of our heart too, the Word be inscribed in letters of light:  Every one that asketh, receiveth.

According to this teaching of the Master, prayer consists of two parts, has two sides, a human and a Divine.  The human is the asking, the Divine is the giving.  Or, to look at both from the human side, there is the asking and the receiving—the two halves that make up a whole.  It is as if He would tell us that we are not to rest without an answer, because it is the will of God, the rule in the Father’s family:  every childlike believing petition is granted.  If no answer comes, we are not to sit down in the sloth that calls itself resignation, and suppose that it is not God’s will to give an answer.  No; there must be something in the prayer that is not as God would have it, childlike and believing; we must seek for grace to pray so that the answer may come.  It is far easier to the flesh to submit without the answer than to yield itself to be searched and purified by the Spirit, until it has learnt to pray the prayer of faith.

It is one of the terrible marks of the diseased state of Christian life in these days, that there are so many who rest content without the distinct experience of answer to prayer.  They pray daily, they ask many things, and trust that some of them will be heard, but know little of direct definite answer to prayer as the rule of daily life.  And it is this the Father wills:  He seeks daily intercourse 36with His children in listening to and granting their petitions.  he wills that I should come to Him day by day with distinct requests; He wills day by day to do for me what I ask.  It was in His answer to prayer that the saints of old learned to know God as the Living One, and were stirred to praise and love (Ps. xxxiv., lxvi. 19, cxvi. 1).  Our Teacher waits to imprint this upon our minds:  prayer and its answer, the child asking and the father giving, belong to each other.

There may be cases in which the answer is a refusal, because the request is not according to God’s Word, as when Moses asked to enter Canaan.  But still, there was an answer:  God did not leave His servant in uncertainty as to His will.  The gods of the heathen are dumb and cannot speak.  Our Father lets His child know when He cannot give him what he asks, and he withdraws his petition, even as the Son did in Gethsemane.  Both Moses the servant and Christ the Son knew that what they asked was not according to what the Lord had spoken:  their prayer was the humble supplication whether it was not possible for the decision to be changed.  God will teach those who are teachable and give Him time, by His Word and Spirit, whether their request be according to His will or not.  Let us withdraw the request, if it be not according to God’s mind, or persevere till the answer come.  Prayer is appointed to obtain the answer.  It is in prayer and its answer that the interchange of love between the Father and His child takes place.

How deep the estrangement of our heart from 37God must be, that we find it so difficult to grasp such promises.  Even while we accept the words and believe their truth, the faith of the heart, that fully has them and rejoices in them, comes so slowly.  It is because our spiritual life is still so weak, and the capacity for taking God’s thoughts is so feeble.  But let us look to Jesus to teach us as none but He can teach.  If we take His words in simplicity, and trust Him by His Spirit to make them within us life and power, they will so enter into our inner being, that the spiritual Divine reality of the truth they contain will indeed take possession of us, and we shall not rest content until every petition we offer is borne heavenward on Jesus’ own words:  ‘Ask, and it shall be given you.’

Beloved fellow-disciples in the school of Jesus!  let us set ourselves to learn this lesson well.  Let us take these words just as they were spoken.  Let us not suffer human reason to weaken their force.  Let us take them as Jesus gives them, and believe them.  He will teach us in due time how to understand them fully:  let us begin by implicitly believing them.  Let us take time, as often as we pray, to listen to His voice:  Every one that asketh, receiveth.  Let us not make the feeble experiences of our unbelief the measure of what our faith may expect.  Let us seek, not only just in our seasons of prayer, but at all times, to hold fast the joyful assurance:  man’s prayer on earth and God’s answer in heaven are meant for each other.  Let us trust Jesus to teach us so to pray 38that the answer can come.  He will do it, if we hold fast the word He gives today:  ‘Ask, and ye shall receive.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

O Lord Jesus!  teach me to understand and believe what Thou hast now promised me.  It is not hid from Thee, O my Lord, with what reasonings my heart seeks to satisfy itself, when no answer comes.  There is the thought that my prayer is not in harmony with the Father’s secret counsel; that there is perhaps something better Thou wouldest give me; or that prayer as fellowship with God is blessing enough without an answer.  And yet, my blessed Lord, I find in Thy teaching on prayer that Thou didst not speak of these things, but didst say so plainly, that prayer may and must expect an answer.  Thou dost assure us that this is the fellowship of a child with the Father:  the child asks and the Father gives.

Blessed Lord!  Thy words are faithful and true.  It must be, because I pray amiss, that my experience of answered prayer is not clearer.  It must be, because I live too little in the Spirit, that my prayer is too little in the Spirit, and that the power for the prayer of faith is wanting.

Lord!  teach me to pray.  Lord Jesus!  I trust Thee for it; teach me to pray in faith.  Lord!  teach me this lesson of today:  Every one that asketh receiveth.  Amen.

06 - Sixth Lesson. 'How much more?' Or, The Infinite Fatherliness of God

Andrew Murray

SIXTH LESSON.

‘How much more?’

Or,    The Infinite Fatherliness of God.

 

‘Or what man is there of you, who, if his son ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent?  If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?’—Matt. vii. 9-11

 

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IN these words our Lord proceeds further to confirm what He had said of the certainty of an answer to prayer.  To remove all doubt, and show us on what sure ground His promise rests, He appeals to what every one has seen and experienced here on earth.  We are all children, and know what we expected of our fathers.  We are fathers, or continually see them; and everywhere we look upon it as the most natural thing there can be, for a father to hear his child.  And the Lord asks us to look up from earthly parents, of whom the best are but evil, and to calculate HOW MUCH MORE the heavenly Father will give good gifts to them that ask Him.  Jesus would lead us up to see, that as much greater as God is than sinful man, so much greater our assurance 40ought to be that He will more surely than any earthly father grant our childlike petitions.  As much greater as God is than man, so much surer is it that prayer will be heard with the Father in heaven than with a father on earth.

As simple and intelligible as this parable is, so deep and spiritual is the teaching it contains.  The Lord would remind us that the prayer of a child owes its influence entirely to the relation in which he stands to the parent.  The prayer can exert that influence only when the child is really living in that relationship, in the home, in the love, in the service of the Father.  The power of the promise, ‘Ask, and it shall be given you,’ lies in the loving relationship between us as children and the Father in heaven; when we live and walk in that relationship, the prayer of faith and its answer will be the natural result.  And so the lesson we have today in the school of prayer is this:  Live as a child of God, then you will be able to pray as a child, and as a child you will most assuredly be heard.

And what is the true child-life?  The answer can be found in any home.  The child that by preference forsakes the father’s house, that finds no pleasure in the presence and love and obedience of the father, and still thinks to ask and obtain what he will, will surely be disappointed.  On the contrary, he to whom the intercourse and will and honour and love of the father are the joy of his life, will find that it is the father’s joy to grant his requests.  41Scripture says, ‘As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the children of God:’  the childlike privilege of asking all is inseparable from the childlike life under the leading of the Spirit.  He that gives himself to be led by the Spirit in his life, will be led by Him in his prayers too.  And he will find that Fatherlike giving is the Divine response to childlike living.

To see what this childlike living is, in which childlike asking and believing have their ground, we have only to notice what our Lord teaches in the Sermon on the Mount of the Father and His children.  In it the prayer-promises are imbedded in the life-precepts; the two are inseparable.  They form one whole; and He alone can count on the fulfilment of the promise, who accepts too all that the Lord has connected with it.  It is as if in speaking the word, ‘Ask, and ye shall receive,’ He says:  I give these promises to those whom in the beatitudes I have pictured in their childlike poverty and purity, and of whom I have said, ‘They shall be called the children of God’ (Matt. v. 3-9):  to children, who ‘let your light shine before men, so that they may glorify your Father in heaven:’  to those who walk in love, ‘that ye may be children of your Father which is in heaven,’ and who seek to be perfect ‘even as your Father in heaven is perfect’ (v. 45):  to those whose fasting and praying and almsgiving (vi. 1-18) is not before men, but ‘before your Father which seeth in secret;’ who forgive ‘even as your Father forgiveth you’ (vi. 15); who 42trust the heavenly Father in all earthly need, seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (vi. 26-32); who not only say, Lord, Lord, but do the will of my Father which is in heaven (vii. 21).  Such are the children of the Father, and such is the life in the Father’s love and service; in such a child-life answered prayers are certain and abundant.

But will not such teaching discourage the feeble one?  If we are first to answer to this portrait of a child, must not many give up all hope of answers to prayer?  The difficulty is removed if we think again of the blessed name of father and child.  A child is weak; there is a great difference among children in age and gift.  The Lord does not demand of us a perfect fulfilment of the law; no, but only the childlike and whole-hearted surrender to live as a child with Him in obedience and truth.  Nothing more.  But also, nothing less.  The Father must have the whole heart.  When this is given, and He sees the child with honest purpose and steady will seeking in everything to be and live as a child, then our prayer will count with Him as the prayer of a child.  Let any one simply and honestly begin to study the Sermon on the Mount and take it as his guide in life, and he will find, notwithstanding weakness and failure, an ever-growing liberty to claim the fulfilment of its promises in regard to prayer.  In the names of father and child he has the pledge that his petitions will be granted. 

This is the one chief thought on which Jesus 43dwells here, and which He would have all His scholars take in.  He would have us see that the secret of effectual prayer is:  to have the heart filled with the Father-love of God.  It is not enough for us to know that God is a Father:  He would have us take time to come under the full impression of what that name implies.  We must take the best earthly father we know; we must think of the tenderness and love with which he regards the request of his child, the love and joy with which he grants every reasonable desire; we must then, as we think in adoring worship of the infinite Love and Fatherliness of God, consider with how much more tenderness and joy He sees us come to Him, and gives us what we ask aright.  And then, when we see how much this Divine arithmetic is beyond our comprehension, and feel how impossible it is for us to apprehend God’s readiness to hear us, then He would have us come and open our heart for the Holy Spirit to shed abroad God’s Father-love there.  Let us do this not only when we want to pray, but let us yield heart and life to dwell in that love.  The child who only wants to know the love of the father when he has something to ask, will be disappointed.  But he who lets God be Father always and in everything, who would fain live his whole life in the Father’s presence and love, who allows God in all the greatness of His love to be a Father to him, oh! he will experience most gloriously that a life in God’s infinite Fatherliness and continual answers to prayer are inseparable.

44Beloved fellow-disciple!  we begin to see what the reason is that we know so little of daily answers to prayer, and what the chief lesson is which the Lord has for us in His school.  It is all in the name of Father.  We thought of new and deeper insight into some of the mysteries of the prayer-world as what we should get in Christ’s school;  He tells us the first is the highest lesson; we must learn to say well, ‘Abba, Father!’  ‘Our Father which art in heaven.’  He that can say this, has the key to all prayer.  In all the compassion with which a father listens to his weak or sickly child, in all the joy with which he hears his stammering child, in all the gentle patience with which he bears with a thoughtless child, we must, as in so many mirrors, study the heart of our Father, until every prayer be borne upward on the faith of this Divine word:  ‘How much more shall your heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask Him.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

Blessed Lord!  Thou knowest that this, though it be one of the first and simplest and most glorious lessons in Thy school, is to our hearts one of the hardest to learn:  we know so little of the love of the Father.  Lord!  teach us so to live with the Father that His love may be to us nearer, clearer, dearer, than the love of any earthly father.  And let the assurance of His hearing our prayer be as much greater than the confidence in an earthly 45parent, as the heavens are higher than earth, as God is infinitely greater than man.  Lord!  show us that it is only our unchildlike distance from the Father that hinders the answer to prayer, and lead us on to the true life of God’s children.  Lord Jesus!  it is fatherlike love that wakens childlike trust.  O reveal to us the Father, and His tender, pitying love, that we may become childlike, and experience how in the child-life lies the power of prayer.

Blessed Son of God!  the Father loveth Thee and hath given Thee all things.  And Thou lovest the Father, and hast done all things He commanded Thee, and therefore hast the power to ask all things.  Lord!  give us Thine own Spirit, the Spirit of the Son.  Make us childlike, as Thou wert on earth.  And let every prayer be breathed in the faith that as the heaven is higher than the earth, so God’s Father-love, and His readiness to give us what we ask, surpasses all we can think or conceive.  Amen.

 

NOTE.1

Your Father which is in heaven.’  Alas!  we speak of it only as the utterance of a reverential homage.  We think of it as a figure borrowed from an earthly life, and only in some faint and shallow meaning to be used of God.  We are afraid to take God as our own tender and pitiful father.  He is a schoolmaster, or almost farther 46off than that, and knowing less about us—an inspector, who knows nothing of us except through our lessons.  His eyes are not on the scholar, but on the book, and all alike must come up to the standard.

Now open the ears of the heart, timid child of God; let it go sinking right down into the inner most depths of the soul.  Here is the starting-point of holiness, in the love and patience and pity of our heavenly Father.  We have not to learn to be holy as a hard lesson at school, that we may make God think well of us; we are to learn it at home with the Father to help us.  God loves you not because you are clever not because you are good, but because He is your Father.  The Cross of Christ does not make God love us; it is the outcome and measure of His love to us.  He loves all His children, the clumsiest, the dullest, the worst of His children.  His love lies at the back of everything, and we must get upon that as the solid foundation of our religious life, not growing up into that, but growing up out of it.  We must begin there or our beginning will come to nothing.  Do take hold of this mightily.  We must go out of ourselves for any hope, or any strength, or any confidence.  And what hope, what strength, what confidence may be ours now that we begin here, your Father which is in heaven!

We need to get in at the tenderness and helpfulness which lie in these words, and to rest upon it—your Father.  Speak them over to yourself until something of the wonderful truth is felt by us.  It means that I am bound to God by the closest and tenderest relationship;  that I have a right to His love and His power and His blessing, such as nothing else could give me.  O the boldness with which we can draw near!  O the great things we have a right to ask for!  Your Father.  It means that all His infinite love and patience and wisdom bend over me to help me.  In this relationship lies not only the possibility of holiness; there is infinitely more than that. 

Here we are to begin, in the patient love of our Father.  Think how He knows us apart and by ourselves, in all 47our peculiarities, and in all our weaknesses and difficulties.  The master judges by the result, but our Father judges by the effort.  Failure does not always mean fault.  He knows how much things cost, and weighs them where others only measure.  YOUR FATHER.  Think how great store His love sets by the poor beginnings of the little ones, clumsy and unmeaning as they may be to others.  All this lies in this blessed relationship and infinitely more.  Do not fear to take it all as your own.

1From Thoughts on Holiness, by Mark Guy Pearse.  What is so beautifully said of the knowledge of God’s Fatherliness as the starting-point of holiness is no less true of prayer.

07 - Seventh Lesson. 'How much more the Holy Spirit;' Or, The All-Comprehensive Gift

Andrew Murray

SEVENTH LESSON.

‘How much more the Holy Spirit;

Or,    The All-Comprehensive Gift.

 

‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?’—Luke xi. 13.

 

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IN the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord had already given utterance to His wonderful HOW MUCH MORE?  Here in Luke, where He repeats the question, there is a difference.  Instead of speaking, as then of giving good gifts, He says, ‘How much more shall the heavenly Father give THE HOLY SPIRIT?’  He thus teaches us that the chief and the best of these gifts is the Holy Spirit, or rather, that in this gift all others are comprisedThe Holy Spirit is the first of the Father’s gifts, and the one He delights most to bestow.  The Holy Spirit is therefore the gift we ought first and chiefly to seek.

The unspeakable worth of this gift we can easily understand.  Jesus spoke of the Spirit as ‘the promise of the Father;’ the one promise in which 49God’s Fatherhood revealed itself.  The best gift a good and wise father can bestow on a child on earth is his own spirit.  This is the great object of a father in education—to reproduce in his child his own disposition and character.  If the child is to know and understand his father; if, as he grows up, he is to enter into all his will and plans; if he is to have his highest joy in the father, and the father in him,—he must be of one mind and spirit with him.  And so it is impossible to conceive of God bestowing any higher gift on His child than this, His own Spirit.  God is what He is through His Spirit; the Spirit is the very life of God.  Just think what it means—God giving His own Spirit to His child on earth.

Or was not this the glory of Jesus as a Son upon earth, that the Spirit of the Father was in Him?  At His baptism in Jordan the two things were united,—the voice, proclaiming Him the Beloved Son, and the Spirit, descending upon Him.  And so the apostle says of us, ‘Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.’  A king seeks in the whole education of his son to call forth in him a kingly spirit.  Our Father in heaven desires to educate us as His children for the holy, heavenly life in which He dwells, and for this gives us, from the depths of His heart, His own Spirit.  It was this which was the whole aim of Jesus when, after having made atonement with His own blood, He entered for us into God’s presence, that He might 50obtain for us, and send down to dwell in us, the Holy Spirit.  As the Spirit of the Father, and of the Son, the whole life and love of the Father and the Son are in Him; and, coming down into us, He lifts us up into their fellowship.  As Spirit of the Father, He sheds abroad the Father’s love, with which He loved the Son, in our hearts, and teaches us to live in it.  As Spirit of the Son, He breathes in us the childlike liberty, and devotion, and obedience in which the Son lived upon earth.  The Father can bestow no higher or more wonderful gift than this:  His own Holy Spirit, the Spirit of sonship.

This truth naturally suggests the thought that this first and chief gift of God must be the first and chief object of all prayer.  For every need of the spiritual life this is the one thing needful, the Holy Spirit.  All the fulness is in Jesus; the fulness of grace and truth, out of which we receive grace for grace.  The Holy Spirit is the appointed conveyancer, whose special work it is to make Jesus and all there is in Him for us ours in personal appropriation, in blessed experience.  He is the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus; as wonderful as the life is, so wonderful is the provision by which such an agent is provided to communicate it to us.  If we but yield ourselves entirely to the disposal of the Spirit, and let Him have His way with us, He will manifest the life of Christ within us.  He will do this with a Divine power, maintaining the life of Christ in us in uninterrupted continuity.  Surely, if there is one prayer that should draw us to the Father’s 51throne and keep us there, it is this:  for the Holy Spirit, whom we as children have received, to stream into us and out from us in greater fulness.

In the variety of the gifts which the Spirit has to dispense, He meets the believer’s every need.  Just think of the names He bears.  The Spirit of grace, to reveal and impart all of grace there is in Jesus.  The Spirit of faith, teaching us to begin and go on and increase in ever believing.  The Spirit of adoption and assurance, who witnesses that we are God’s children, and inspires the confiding and confident Abba, Father!  The Spirit of truth, to lead into all truth, to make each word of God ours in deed and in truth.  The Spirit of prayer, through whom we speak with the Father; prayer that must be heard.  The Spirit of judgment and burning, to search the heart, and convince of sin.  The Spirit of holiness, manifesting and communicating the Father’s holy presence within us.  The Spirit of power, through whom we are strong to testify boldly and work effectually in the Father’s service.  The Spirit of glory, the pledge of our inheritance, the preparation and the foretaste of the glory to come.  Surely the child of God needs but one thing to be able really to live as a child:  it is, to be filled with this Spirit.

And now, the lesson Jesus teaches us today in His school is this:  That the Father is just longing to give Him to us if we will but ask in the childlike dependence on what He says:  ‘If ye know to give good gifts unto your children, HOW MUCH MORE shall 52your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him.’  In the words of God’s promise, ‘I will pour out my Spirit abundantly;’ and of His command, ‘Be ye filled with the Spirit’ we have the measure of what God is ready to give, and what we may obtain.  As God’s children, we have already received the Spirit.  But we still need to ask and pray for His special gifts and operations as we require them.  And not only this, but for Himself to take complete and entire possession; for His unceasing momentary guidance.  Just as the branch, already filled with the sap of the vine, is ever crying for the continued and increasing flow of that sap, that it may bring its fruit to perfection, so the believer, rejoicing in the possession of the Spirit, ever thirsts and cries for more.  And what the great Teacher would have us learn is, that nothing less than God’s promise and God’s command may be the measure of our expectation and our prayer; we must be filled abundantly.  He would have us ask this in the assurance that the wonderful HOW MUCH MORE of God’s Father-love is the pledge that, when we ask, we do most certainly receive.

Let us now believe this.  As we pray to be filled with the Spirit, let us not seek for the answer in our feelings.  All spiritual blessings must be received, that is, accepted or taken in faith.1  Let me believe, the Father gives the Holy Spirit to 53His praying child.  Even now, while I pray, I must say in faith:  I have what I ask, the fulness of the Spirit is mine.  Let us continue stedfast in this faith.  On the strength of God’s Word we know that we have what we ask.  Let us, with thanksgiving that we have been heard, with thanksgiving for what we have received and taken and now hold as ours, continue stedfast in believing prayer that the blessing, which has already been givenus, and which we hold in faith, may break through and fill our whole being.  It is in such believing thanksgiving and prayer, that our soul opens up for the Spirit to take entire and undisturbed possession.  It is such prayer that not only asks and hopes, but takes and holds, that inherits the full blessing.  In all our prayer let us remember the lesson the Saviour would teach us this day, that, if there is one thing on earth we can be sure of, it is this, that the Father desires to have us filled with His Spirit, that He delights to give us His Spirit.

And when once we have learned thus to believe for ourselves, and each day to take out of the treasure we hold in heaven, what liberty and power to pray for the outpouring of the Spirit on the Church of God, on all flesh, on individuals, or on special efforts!  He that has once learned to know the Father in prayer for himself, learns to pray most confidently for others too.  The Father gives the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him, not least, but most, when they ask for others.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

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Father in heaven!  Thou didst send Thy Son to revealThyself to us, Thy Father-love, and all that that love has for us.  And He has taught us, that the gift above all gifts which Thou wouldst bestow in answer to prayer is, the Holy Spirit.

O my Father!  I come to Thee with this prayer; there is nothing I would—may I not say, I do—desire so much as to be filled with the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.  The blessings He brings are so unspeakable, and just what I need.  He sheds abroad Thy love in the heart, and fills it with Thy self.  I long for this.  He breathes the mind and life of Christ in me, so that I live as He did, in and for the Father’s love.  I long for this.  He endues with power from on high for all my walk and work.  I long for this.  O Father!  I beseech Thee, give me this day the fulness of Thy Spirit.

Father!  I ask this, resting on the words of my Lord:  ‘HOW MUCH MORE THE HOLY SPIRIT.’  I dobelieve that Thou hearest my prayer; I receive now what I ask; Father!  I claim and I take it:  the fulness of Thy Spirit is mine.  I receive the gift this day again as a faith gift; in faith I reckon my Father works through the Spirit all He has promised.  The Father delights to breathe His Spirit into His waiting child as He tarries in fellowship with Himself.  Amen.

1 The Greek word for receiving and taking is the same.  When Jesus said, ‘Everyone that asketh receiveth,’ He used the same verb as at the Supper, ‘Take, eat,’ or on the resurrection morning, ‘Receive,’ accept, take, ‘the Holy Spirit.’  Receiving not only implies God’s bestowment, but our acceptance.

08 - Eighth Lesson. 'Because of his importunity;' Or, The Boldness of God's Friends

Andrew Murray

EIGHTH LESSON.

‘Because of his importunity;’

Or,    The Boldness of God’s Friends.

 

‘And He said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go to him at midnight, and say to him, Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine is come to me from a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’ and he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not:  the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee.  I say unto you, though he will not rise and give him because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.’—Luke xi. 5-8.

 

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THE first teaching to His disciples was given by our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount.  It was near a year later that the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray.  In answer He gave them a second time the Lord’s Prayer, so teaching them  what to pray.  He then speaks of  how they ought to pray, and repeats what he formerly said of God’s Fatherliness and the certainty of an answer.  But in between He adds the beautiful parable of the friend at midnight, to teach them the two fold lesson, that God does not only want us to pray for ourselves, 56but for the perishing around us, and that in such intercession great boldness of entreaty is often needful, and always lawful, yea, pleasing to God.

The parable is a perfect storehouse of instruction in regard to true intercession.  There is, first, the love which seeks to help the needy around us:  ‘my friend is come to me.’  Then the need which urges to the cry‘I have nothing to set before him.’  Then follows the confidence that help is to be had:  ‘which of you shall have a friend, and say, Friend, lend me three loaves.’  Then comes the unexpected refusal:  ‘I cannot rise and give thee.’  Then again the perseverance that takes no refusal:  ‘because of his importunity.’  And lastly, the reward of such prayer:  ‘he will give him as many as he needeth.’  A wonderful setting forth of the way of prayer and faith in which the blessing of God has so often been sought and found.

Let us confine ourselves to the chief thought:  prayer as an appeal to the friendship of God; and we shall find that two lessons are specially suggested.  The one, that if we are God’s friends, and come as such to Him, we must prove ourselves the friends of the needy; God’s friendship to us and ours to others go hand in hand.  The other, that when we come thus we may use the utmost liberty in claiming an answer.

There is a twofold use of prayer:  the one, to obtain strength and blessing for our own life; the other, the higher, the true glory of prayer, for which Christ has taken us into His fellowship and teaching, is 57intercession, where prayer is the royal power a child of God exercises in heaven on behalf of others and even of the kingdom.  We see it in Scripture, how it was in intercession for others that Abraham and Moses, Samuel and Elijah, with all the holy men of old, proved that they had power with God and prevailed.  It is when we give ourselves to be a blessing that we can specially count on the blessing of God.  It is when we draw near to God as the friend of the poor and the perishing that we may count on His friendliness; the righteous man who is the friend of the poor is very specially the friend of God.  This gives wonderful liberty in prayer.  Lord!  I have a needy friend whom I must help.  As a friend I have undertaken to help him.  In Thee I have a Friend, whose kindness and riches I know to be infinite:  I am sure Thou wilt give me what I ask.  If I, being evil, am ready to do for my friend what I can, how much more wilt Thou, O my heavenly Friend, now do for Thy friend what he asks?

The question might suggest itself, whether the Fatherhood of God does not give such confidence in prayer, that the thought of His Friendship can hardly teach us anything more:  a father is more than a friend.  And yet, if we consider it, this pleading the friendship of God opens new wonders to us.  That a child obtains what he asks of his father looks so perfectly natural, we almost count it the father’s duty to give.  But with a friend it is as if the kindness is more free, dependent, not on 58nature, but on sympathy and character.  And then the relation of a child is more that of perfect dependence; two friends are more nearly on a level.  And so our Lord, in seeking to unfold to us the spiritual mystery of prayer, would fain have us approach God in this relation too, as those whom He has acknowledged as His friends, whose mind and life are in sympathy with His.

But then we must be living as His friends.  I am still a child even when a wanderer; but friendship depends upon the conduct.  ‘Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you.’  ‘Thou seest that faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect; and the scripture was fulfilled which saith, And Abraham believed God, and he was called the friend of God.’  It is the Spirit, ‘the same Spirit,’ that leads us that also bears witness to our acceptance with God; ‘likewise, also,’ the same Spirit helpeth us in prayer.  It is a life as the friend of God that gives the wonderful liberty to say:  I have a friend to whom I can go even at midnight.  And how much more when I go in the very spirit of that friendliness, manifesting myself the very kindness I look for in God, seeking to help my friend as I want God to help me.  When I come to God in prayer, He always looks to what the aim is of my petition.  If it be merely for my own comfort or joy I seek His grace, I do not receive.  But if I can say that it is that He may be glorified in my dispensing His blessings to others, I shall not ask in vain.  Or if I ask for others, but want to 59wait until God has made me so rich, that it is no sacrifice or act of faith to aid them, I shall not obtain.  But if I can say that I have already undertaken for my needy friend, that in my poverty I have already begun the work of love, because I know I had a friend Who would help me, my prayer will be heard.  Oh, we know not how much the plea avails:  the friendship of earth looking in its need to the friendship of heaven:  ‘He will give him as much as he needeth.’

But not always at once.  The one thing by which man can honour and enjoy his God is faith.  Intercession is part of faith’s training-school.  There our friendship with men and with God is tested.  There it is seen whether my friendship with the needy is so real, that I will take time and sacrifice my rest, will go even at midnight and not cease until I have obtained for them what I need.  There it is seen whether my friendship with God is so clear, that I can depend on Him not to turn me away and therefore pray on until He gives.

O what a deep heavenly mystery this is of persevering prayer.  The God who has promised, who longs, whose fixed purpose it is to give the blessing, holds it back.  It is to Him a matter of such deep importance that His friends on earth should know and fully trust their rich Friend in heaven, that He trains them, in the school of answer delayed, to find out how their perseverance really does prevail, and what the mighty power is they can wield in heaven, if they do but set themselves to it.  There is 60a faith that sees the promise, and embraces it, and yet does not receive it (Heb. xi. 13, 39).  It is when the answer to prayer does not come, and the promise we are most firmly trusting appears to be of none effect, that the trial of faith, more precious than of gold, takes place.  It is in this trial that the faith that has embraced the promise is purified and strengthened and prepared in personal, holy fellowship with the living God, to see the glory of God.  It takes and holds the promise until it has received the fulfilment of what it had claimed in a living truth in the unseen but living God.

Let each child of God who is seeking to work the work of love in his Father’s service take courage.  The parent with his child, the teacher with his class, the visitor with his district, the Bible reader with his circle, the preacher with his hearers, each one who, in his little circle, has accepted and is bearing the burden of hungry, perishing souls,—let them all take courage.  Nothing is at first so strange to us as that God should really require persevering prayer, that there should be a real spiritual needs-be for importunity.  To teach it us, the Master uses this almost strange parable.  If the unfriendliness of a selfish earthly friend can be conquered by importunity, how much more will it avail with the heavenly Friend, who does so love to give, but is held back by our spiritual unfitness, our incapacity to possess what He has to give.  O let us thank Him that in delaying His answer He is educating us up to our true position and the exercise of all our power with 61Him, training us to live with Him in the fellowship of undoubting faith and trust, to be indeed the friends of God.  And let us hold fast the threefold cord that cannot be broken:  the hungry friend needing the help, and the praying friend seeking the help, and the Mighty Friend, loving to give as much as he needeth.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

O my Blessed Lord and Teacher!  I must come to Thee in prayer.  Thy teaching is so glorious, and yet too high for me to grasp.  I must confess that my heart is too little to take in these thoughts of the wonderful boldness I may use with Thy Father as my Friend.  Lord Jesus!  I trust Thee to give me Thy Spirit with Thy Word, and to make the Word quick and powerful in my heart.  I desire to keep Thy Word of this day:  ‘Because of his importunity he will give him as many as he needeth.’

Lord!  teach me more to know the power of persevering prayer.  I know that in it the Father suits Himself to our need of time for the inner life to attain its growth and ripeness, so that His grace may indeed be assimilated and made our very own.  I know that He would fain thus train us to the exercise of that strong faith that does not let Him go even in the face of seeming disappointment.  I know He wants to lift us to that wonderful liberty, in which we understand how really He has 62made the dispensing of His gift dependent on our prayer.  Lord!  I know this:  O teach me to see it in spirit and truth.

And may it now be the joy of my life to become the almoner of my Rich Friend in heaven, to care for all the hungry and perishing, even at midnight, because I know MY FRIEND, who always gives to him who perseveres, because of his importunity, as many as he needeth.  Amen.

09 - Ninth Lesson. 'Pray the Lord of the harvest;' Or, Prayer provides Labourers

Andrew Murray

NINTH LESSON.

‘Pray the Lord of the harvest;’

Or,          Prayer provides Labourers.

 

‘Then saith He unto His disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few.  Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth labourers into His harvest.’—Matt. ix. 37-38.

 

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THE Lord frequently taught His disciples that they must pray, and how; but seldom what to pray.  This he left to their sense of need, and the leading of the Spirit.  But here we have one thing He expressly enjoins them to remember:  in view of the plenteous harvest, and the need of reapers, they must cry to the Lord of the harvest to send forth labourers.  Just as in the parable of the friend at midnight, He would have them understand that prayer is not to be selfish; so here it is the power through which blessing can come to others.  The Father is Lord of the harvest; when we pray for the Holy Spirit, we must pray for Him to prepare and send forth labourers for the work.

Strange, is it not, that He should ask His 64disciples to pray for this?  And could He not pray Himself?  And would not one prayer of His avail more than a thousand of theirs?  And God, the Lord of the harvest, did He not see the need?  And would not He, in His own good time, send forth labourers without their prayer?  Such questions lead us up to the deepest mysteries of prayer, and its power in the Kingdom of God.  The answer to such questions will convince us that prayer is indeed a power, on which the ingathering of the harvest and the coming of the Kingdom do in very truth depend.

Prayer is no form or show.  The Lord Jesus was Himself the truth; everything He spake was the deepest truth.  It was when (see ver. 36) ‘He saw the multitude, and was moved with compassion on them, because they were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd,’ that He called on the disciples to pray for labourers to be sent among them.  He 65did so because He really believed that their prayer was needed, and would help.  The veil which so hides the invisible world from us was wonderfully transparent to the holy human soul of Jesus.  He had looked long and deep and far into the hidden connection of cause and effect in the spirit world.  He had marked in God’s Word how, when God called men like Abraham and Moses, Joshua and Samuel and Daniel, and given them authority over men in His name, He had at the same time given them authority and right to call in the powers of heaven to their aid as they needed them.  He knew that as to these men of old, and to Himself for a time, here upon earth, the work of God had been entrusted, so it was now about to pass over into the hands of His disciples.  He knew that when this work should be given in charge to them, it would not be a mere matter of form or show, but that on them, and their being faithful or unfaithful, the success of the work would actually depend.  As a single individual, within the limitations of a human body and a human life, Jesus feels how little a short visit can accomplish among these wandering sheep He sees around Him, and He longs for help to have them properly cared for.  And so He tells His disciples now to begin and pray, and, when they have taken over the work from Him on earth, to make this one of the chief petitions in their prayer:  That the Lord of the harvest Himself would send forth labourers into His harvest.  The God who entrusted them with the work, and made it to so large extent dependent on them, gives them authority to apply to Him for labourers to help, and makes the supply dependent on their prayer.

How little Christians really feel and mourn the need of labourers in the fields of the world so white to the harvest.  And how little they believe that our labour-supply depends on prayer, that prayer will really provide ‘as many as he needeth.’  Not that the dearth of labour is not known or discussed.  Not that efforts are not sometimes put forth to supply the want.  But how little the burden of the sheep wandering without a Shepherd 66is really borne in the faith that the Lord of the harvest will, in answer to prayer, send forth the labourers, and in the solemn conviction that without this prayer fields ready for reaping will be left to perish.  And yet it is so.  So wonderful is the surrender of His work into the hands of His Church, so dependent has the Lord made Himself on them as His body, through whom alone His work can be done, so real is the power which the Lord gives His people to exercise in heaven and earth, that the number of the labourers and the measure of the harvest does actually depend upon their prayer.

Solemn thought!  O why is it that we do not obey the injunction of the Master more heartily, and cry more earnestly for labourers?  There are two reasons for this.  The one is:  We miss the compassion of Jesus, which gave rise to this request for prayer.  When believers learn that to love their neighbours as themselves, that to live entirely for God’s glory in their fellow-men, is the Father’s first commandment to His redeemed ones, they will accept of the perishing ones as the charge entrusted to them by their Lord.  And, accepting them not only as a field of labour, but as the objects of loving care and interest, it will not be long before compassion towards the hopelessly perishing will touch their heart, and the cry ascend with an earnestness till then unknown:  Lord!  send labourers.  The other reason for the neglect of the command, the want of faith, will then make itself felt, but will 67be overcome as our pity pleads for help.  We believe too little in the power of prayer to bring about definite results.  We do not live close enough to God, and are not enough entirely given up to His service and Kingdom, to be capable of the confidence that He will give it in answer to our prayer.  O let us pray for a life so one with Christ, that His compassion may stream into us, and His Spirit be able to assure us that our prayer avails.

Such prayer will ask and obtain a twofold blessing.  There will first be the desire for the increase of men entirely given up to the service of God.  It is a terrible blot upon the Church of Christ that there are times when actually men cannot be found for the service of the Master as ministers, missionaries, or teachers of God’s Word.  As God’s children make this a matter of supplication for their own circle or Church, it will be given.  The Lord Jesus is now Lord of the harvest.  He has been exalted to bestow gifts—the gifts of the Spirit.  His chief gifts are men filled with the Spirit.  But the supply and distribution of the gifts depend on the co-operation of Head and members.  It is just prayer will lead to such co-operation; the believing suppliants will be stirred to find the men and the means for the work.

The other blessing to be asked will not be less.  Every believer is a labourer; not one of God’s children who has not been redeemed for service, and has not his work waiting.  It must be our 68prayer that the Lord would so fill all His people with the spirit of devotion, that not one may be found standing idle in the vineyard.  Wherever there is a complaint of the want of helpers, or of fit helpers in God’s work, prayer has the promise of a supply.  There is no Sunday school or district visiting, no Bible reading or rescue work, where God is not ready and able to provide.  It may take time and importunity, but the command of Christ to ask the Lord of the harvest is the pledge that the prayer will be heard:  ‘I say unto you, he will arise and give him as many as he needeth.’

Solemn, blessed thought!  this power has been given us in prayer to provide in the need of the world, to secure the servants for God’s work.  The Lord of the harvest will hear.  Christ, who called us so specially to pray thus, will support our prayers offered in His name and interest.  Let us set apart time and give ourselves to this part of our intercessory work.  It will lead us into the fellowship of that compassionate heart of His that led Him to call for our prayers.  It will elevate us to the insight of our regal position, as those whose will counts for something with the great God in the advancement of His Kingdom.  It will make us feel how really we are God’s fellow-workers on earth, to whom a share in His work has in downright earnest been entrusted.  It will make us partakers in the soul travail, but also in the soul satisfaction of Jesus, as we know how, in answer to 69our prayer, blessing has been given that otherwise would not have come.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

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Blessed Lord!  Thou hast this day again given us another of Thy wondrous lessons to learn.  We humbly ask Thee, O give us to see aright the spiritual realities of which Thou hast been speaking.  There is the harvest which is so large, and perishing, as it waits for sleepy disciples to give the signal for labourers to come.  Lord, teach us to look out upon it with a heart moved with compassion and pity.  There are the labourers, so few.  Lord, show us how terrible the sin of the want of prayer and faith, of which this is the token.  And there is the Lord of the harvest, so able and ready to send them forth.  Lord, show us how He does indeed wait for the prayer to which He has bound His answer.  And there are the disciples, to whom the commission to pray has been given:  Lord, show us how Thou canst pour down Thy Spirit and breathe upon them, so that Thy compassion and the faith in Thy promise shall rouse them to unceasing, prevailing prayer.

O our Lord!  we cannot understand how Thou canst entrust such work and give such power to men so slothful and unfaithful.  We thank Thee for all whom Thou art teaching to cry day and night for labourers to be sent forth.  Lord, breathe Thine own Spirit on all Thy children, that they may 70learn to live for this one thing alone—the Kingdom and glory of their Lord—and become fully awake to the faith of what their prayer can accomplish.  And let all our hearts in this, as in every petition, be filled with the assurance that prayer, offered in loving faith in the living God, will bring certain and abundant answer.  Amen.

10 - Tenth Lesson. 'What wilt thou?' Or, Prayer must be Definite

Andrew Murray

TENTH LESSON.

‘What wilt thou?’

Or,          Prayer must be Definite.

 

‘And Jesus answered him, and said, What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?’—Mark x. 51; Luke xviii. 41.

 

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THE blind man had been crying out aloud, and that a great deal, ‘Thou Son of David, have mercy on me.’  The cry had reached the ear of the Lord; He knew what he wanted, and was ready to grant it him.  But ere He does it, He asks him:  ‘What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?’  He wants to hear from his own lips, not only the general petition for mercy, but the distinct expression of what his desire was.  Until he speaks it out, he is not healed.

There is now still many a suppliant to whom the Lord puts the same question, and who cannot, until it has been answered, get the aid he ask.  Our prayers must not be a vague appeal to His mercy, an indefinite cry for blessing, but the distinct expression of definite need.  Not that His loving heart does not understand our cry, or is not72ready to hear.  But He desires it for our own sakes.  Such definite prayer teaches us to know our own needs better.  It demands time, and thought, and self-scrutiny to find out what really is our greatest need.  It searches us and puts us to the test as to whether our desires are honest and real, such as we are ready to persevere in.  It leads us to judge whether our desires are according to God’s Word, and whether we really believe that we shall receive the things we ask.  It helps us to wait for the special answer, and to mark it when it comes.

And yet how much of our prayer is vague and pointless.  Some cry for mercy, but take not the trouble to know what mercy must do for them.  Others ask, perhaps, to be delivered from sin, but do not begin by bringing any sin by name from which the deliverance may be claimed.  Still others pray for God’s blessing on those around them, for the outpouring of God’s Spirit on their land or the world, and yet have no special field where they wait and expect to see the answer.  To all the Lord says:  And what is it now you really want and expect Me to do?  Every Christian has but limited powers, and as he must have his own special field of labour in which he works, so with his prayers too.  Each believer has his own circle, his family, his friends, his neighbours.  If he were to take one or more of these by name, he would find that this really brings him into the training-school of faith, and leads to personal and pointed dealing with his God.  It is when in such distinct matters 73we have in faith claimed and received answers, that our more general prayers will be believing and effectual.

We all know with what surprise the whole civilised world heard of the way in which trained troops were repulsed by the Transvaal Boers at Majuba.  And to what did they owe their success?  In the armies of Europe the soldier fires upon the enemy standing in large masses, and never thinks of seeking an aim for every bullet.  In hunting game the Boer had learnt a different lesson:  his practised eye knew to send every bullet on its special message, to seek and find its man.  Such aiming must gain the day in the spiritual world too.  As long as in prayer we just pour out our hearts in a multitude of petitions, without taking time to see whether every petition is sent with the purpose and expectation of getting an answer, not many will reach the mark.  But if, as in silence of soul we bow before the Lord, we were to ask such questions as these:  What is now really my desire?  do I desire it in faith, expecting to receive?  am I now ready to place and leave it in the Father’s bosom?  is it a settled thing between God and me that I am to have the answer?  we should learn so to pray that God would see and we would know what we really expect.

It is for this, among other reasons, that the Lord warns us against the vain repetitions of the Gentiles, who think to be heard for their much praying.  We often hear prayers of great earnestness and fervour, in which a multitude of petitions are poured forth, but to which the Saviour would undoubtedly answer ‘What 74wilt thou that I should do unto thee?’  If I am in a strange land, in the interests of the business which my father owns, I would certainly write two different sorts of letters.  There will be family letters giving expression to all the intercourse to which affection prompts; and there will be business letters, containing orders for what I need.  And there may be letters in which both are found.  The answers will correspond to the letters.  To each sentence of the letters containing the family news I do not expect a special answer.  But for each order I send I am confident of an answer whether the desired article has been forwarded.  In our dealings with God the business element must not be wanting.  With our expression of need and sin, of love and faith and consecration, there must be the pointed statement of what we ask and expect to receive; it is in the answer that the Father loves to give us the token of His approval and acceptance.

But the word of the Master teaches us more.  He does not say, What dost thou wish? but, What does thou will?  One often wishes for a thing without willing it.  I wishto have a certain article, but I find the price too high; I resolve not to take it; I wish, but do not will to have it.  The sluggard wishes to be rich, but does not will it.  Many a one wishes to be saved, but perishes because he does not will it.  The will rules the whole heart and life; if I really will to have anything that is within my reach, I do not rest till I have it.  And so, when Jesus says to us, ‘What wilt thou?’ He asks whether it is 75indeed our purpose to have what we ask at any price, however great the sacrifice.  Dost thou indeed so will to have it that, though He delay it long, thou dost not hold thy peace till He hear thee?  Alas! how many prayers are wishes, sent up for a short time and then forgotten, or sent up year after year as matter of duty, while we rest content with the prayer without the answer.

But, it may be asked, is it not best to make our wishes known to God, and then to leave it to Him to decide what is best, without seeking to assert our will?  By no means.  This is the very essence of the prayer of faith, to which Jesus sought to train His disciples, that it does not only make known its desire and then leave the decision to God.  That would be the prayer of submission, for cases in which we cannot know God’s will.  But the prayer of faith, finding God’s will in some promise of the Word, pleads for that till it come.  In Matthew (ix. 28) we read Jesus said to the blind man:  ‘Believe ye that I can do this?’  Here, in Mark, He says:  ‘What wilt thou that I should do?’  In both cases He said that faith had saved them.  And so He said to the Syrophenician woman, too:  ‘Great is thy faith:  be it unto thee even as thou wilt.’  Faith is nothing but the purpose of the will resting on God’s word, and saying:  I must have it.  To believe truly is to will firmly.

But is not such a will at variance with our dependence on God and our submission to Him?  By no means; it is much rather the true submission that honours God.  It is only when the child has 76yielded his own will in entire surrender to the Father, that he receives from the Father liberty and power to will what he would have.  But, when once the believer has accepted the will of God, as revealed through the Word and Spirit, as his will, too, then it is the will of God that His child should use this renewed will in His service.  The will is the highest power in the soul; grace wants above everything to sanctify and restore this will, one of the chief traits of God’s image, to full and free exercise.  As a son, who only lives for his father’s interests, who seeks not his own but his father’s will is trusted by the father with his business, so God speaks to His child in all truth, ‘What wilt thou?’  It is often spiritual sloth that, under the appearance of humility, professes to have no will, because it fears the trouble of searching out the will of God, or, when found, the struggle of claiming it in faith.  True humility is ever in company with strong faith, which only seeks to know what is according to the will of God, and then boldly claims the fulfilment of the promise:  ‘Ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

Lord Jesus!  teach me to pray with all my heart and strength, that there may be no doubt with Thee or with me as to what I have asked.  May I so know what I desire that, even as my petitions are recorded in heaven, I can record them on earth 77too, and note each answer as it comes.  And may my faith in what Thy Word has promised be so clear that the Spirit may indeed work in me the liberty to will that it shall come.  Lord!  renew, strengthen, sanctify wholly my will for the work of effectual prayer.

Blessed Saviour!  I do beseech Thee to reveal to me the wonderful condescension Thou showest us, thus asking us to say what we will that Thou shouldest do, and promising to do whatever we will.  Son of God!  I cannot understand it; I can only believe that Thou hast indeed redeemed us wholly for Thyself, and dost seek to make the will, as our noblest part, Thy most efficient servant.  Lord!  I do most unreservedly yield my will to Thee, as the power through which Thy Spirit is to rule my whole being.  Let Him take possession of it, lead it into the truth of Thy promises, and make it so strong in prayer that I may ever hear Thy voice saying:  ‘Great is thy faith:  be it unto thee even as thou wilt.’  Amen.

11 - Eleventh Lesson. 'Believe that ye have received;' Or, The Faith that Takes

Andrew Murray

ELEVENTH LESSON.

‘Believe that ye have received;’

Or,    The Faith that Takes.

 

‘Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them.’—Mark xi. 24

 

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WHAT a promise!  so large, so Divine, that our little hearts cannot take it in, and in every possible way seek to limit it to what we think safe or probable; instead of allowing it, in its quickening power and energy, just as He gave it, to enter in, and to enlarge our hearts to the measure of what His love and power are really ready to do for us.  Faith is very far from being a mere conviction of the truth of God’s word, or a conclusion drawn from certain premises.  It is the ear which has heard God say what He will do, the eye which has seen Him doing it, and, therefore, where there is true faith, it is impossible but the answer must come.  If we only see to it that we do the one thing that He asks of us as we pray:  BELIEVE that ye have received; He will see to it that He does the thing He has 79promised:  ‘Ye shall have them.’  The key-note of Solomon’s prayer (2 Chron. vi. 4), ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who hath with His hands fulfilled that which He spake with His mouth to my father David,’ is the key-note of all true prayer:  the joyful adoration of a God whose hand always secures the fulfilment of what His mouth hath spoken.  Let us in this spirit listen to the promise Jesus gives; each part of it has its Divine message.

All things whatsoever.’  At this first word our human wisdom at once begins to doubt and ask:  This surely cannot be literally true?  But if it be not, why did the Master speak it, using the very strongest expression He could find:  ‘All things whatsoever.’  And it is not as if this were the only time He spoke thus; is it not He who also said, ‘If thou canst believe, ALL THINGS are possible to him that believeth;’  ‘If ye have faith, NOTHING shall be impossible to you.’  Faith is so wholly the work of God’s Spirit through His word in the prepared heart of the believing disciple, that it is impossible that the fulfilment should not come; faith is the pledge and forerunner of the coming answer.  Yes, ‘ALL THINGS WHATSOEVER ye shall ask in prayer believing, ye receive.’  The tendency of human reason is to interpose here, and with certain qualifying clauses, ‘if expedient,’ ‘if according to God’s will,’ to break the force of a statement which appears dangerous.  O let us beware of dealing thus with the Master’s words.   His promise is most 80literally true.  He wants His oft repeated ‘ALL THINGS’ to enter into our hearts, and reveal to us how mighty the power of faith is, how truly the Head calls the members to share with Him in His power, how wholly our Father places His power at the disposal of the child that wholly trusts Him.  In this ‘all things’ faith is to have its food and strength:  as we weaken it we weaken faith.  The WHATSOEVER is unconditional:  the only condition is what is implied in the believing.  Ere we can believe we must find out and know what God’s will is’ believing is the exercise of a soul surrendered and given up to the influence of the Word and the Spirit; but when once we do believe nothing shall be impossible.  God forbid that we should try and bring down His ALL THINGS to the level of what we think possible.  Let us now simply take Christ’s ‘WHATSOEVER’ as the measure and the hope of our faith:  it is a seed-word which, if taken just as He gives it, and kept in the heart, will unfold itself and strike root, fill our life with its fulness, and bring forth fruit abundantly.

‘All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for.’  It is in prayer that these ‘all things’ are to be brought to God, to be asked and received of Him.  The faith that receives them is the fruit of the prayer.  In one aspect there must be faith before there can be prayer; in another the faith is the outcome and the growth of prayer.  It is in the personal presence of the Saviour, in intercourse with Him, that faith rises to grasp what at first appeared too high.  It is in prayer that we 81hold up our desire to the light of God’s Holy Will, that our motives are tested, and proof given whether we ask indeed in the name of Jesus, and only for the glory of God.  It is in prayer that we wait for the leading of the Spirit to show us whether we are asking the right thing and in the right spirit.  It is in prayer that we become conscious of our want of faith, that we are led on to say to the Father that we do believe, and that we prove the reality of our faith by the confidence with which we persevere.  It is in prayer that Jesus teaches and inspires faith.  He that waits to pray, or loses heart in prayer, because he does not yet feel the faith needed to get the answer, will never learn to believe.  He who begins to pray and ask will find the Spirit of faith is given nowhere so surely as at the foot of the Throne.

Believe that ye have received.’  It is clear that what we are to believe is, that we receive the very things we ask.  The Saviour does not hint that because the Father knows what is best He may give us something else.  The very mountain faith bids depart is cast into the sea.  There is a prayer in which, in everything, we make known our requests with prayer and supplication, and the reward is the sweet peace of God keeping heart and mind.  This is the prayer of trust. It has reference to things of which we cannot find out if God is going to give them.  As children we make known our desires in the countless things of daily life, and leave it to the Father to give or not as He thinks best.  But the prayer of faith of which Jesus speaks is something 82different, something higher.  When, whether in the greater interests of the Master’s work, or in the lesser concerns of our daily life, the soul is led to see how there is nothing that so honours the Father as the faith that is assured that He will do what He has said in giving us whatsoever we ask for, and takes its stand on the promise as brought home by the Spirit, it may know most certainly that it does receive exactly what it asks.  Just see how clearly the Lord sets this before us in verse 23:  ‘Whosoever shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what he saith cometh to pass, he shall have it.’  This is the blessing of the prayer of faith of which Jesus speaks.

‘Believe that ye have received.’  This is the word of central importance, of which the meaning is too often misunderstood.  Believe that you have received! now, while praying, the thing you ask for.  It may only be later that you shall have it in personal experience, that you shall see what you believe; but now, without seeing, you are to believe that it has been given you of the Father in heaven.  The receiving or accepting of an answer to prayer is just like the receiving or accepting of Jesus or of pardon, a spiritual thing, an act of faith apart from all feeling.  When I come as a supplicant for pardon, I believe that Jesus in heaven is for me, and so I receive or take Him.  When I come as a supplicant for any special gift, which is according to God’s word, I believe that what I ask is given me:  I believe that I have it, I hold it in faith; I thank God that it is 83mine.  ‘If we know that He heareth us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked of Him.’

And ye shall have them.’  That is, the gift which we first hold in faith as bestowed upon us in heaven will also become ours in personal experience.  But will it be needful to pray longer if once we know we have been heard and have received what we asked?  There are cases in which such prayer will not be needful, in which the blessing is ready to break through at once, if we but hold fast our confidence, and prove our faith by praising for what we have received, in the face of our not yet having it in experience.  There are other cases in which the faith that has received needs to be still further tried and strengthened in persevering prayer.  God only knows when everything in and around us is fully ripe for the manifestation of the blessing that has been given to faith.  Elijah knew for certain that rain would come; God had promised it; and yet he had to pray the seven times.  And that prayer was no show or play; an intense spiritual reality in the heart of him who lay pleading there, and in the heaven above where it had its effectual work to do.  It is ‘through faith and patience we inherit the promises.’  Faith says most confidently, I have received it.  Patience perseveres in prayer until the gift bestowed in heaven is seen on earth.  ‘Believe that ye have received, and ye shall have.’  Between the have received in heaven, and the shall haveof earth, believe:  believing praise and prayer is the link.

And now, 84remember one thing more:  It is Jesus who said this.  As we see heaven thus opened to us, and the Father on the Throne offering to give us whatsoever we ask in faith, our hearts feel full of shame that we have so little availed ourselves of our privilege, and full of fear lest our feeble faith still fail to grasp what is so clearly placed within our reach.  There is one thing must make us strong and full of hope:  it is Jesus who has brought us this message from the Father.  He Himself, when He was on earth, lived the life of faith and prayer.  It was when the disciples expressed their surprise at what He had done to the fig-tree, that He told them that the very same life He led could be theirs; that they could not only command the fig-tree, but the very mountain, and it must obey.  And He is our life:  all He was on earth He is in us now; all He teaches He really gives.  He is Himself the Author and the Perfecter of our faith:  He gives the spirit of faith; let us not be afraid that such faith is not meant for us.  It is meant for every child of the Father; it is within reach of each one who will but be childlike, yielding himself to the Father’s Will and Love, trusting the Father’s Word and Power.  Dear fellow-Christian! let the thought that this word comes through Jesus, the Son, our Brother, give us courage, and let our answer be:  Yea, Blessed Lord, we do believe Thy Word, we do believe that we receive.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

Blessed Lord!  Thou 85didst come from the Father to show us all His love, and all the treasures of blessing that love is waiting to bestow.  Lord!  Thou hast this day again flung the gates so wide open, and given us such promises as to our liberty in prayer, that we must blush that our poor hearts have so little taken it in.  It has been too large for us to believe.

Lord! we now look up to Thee to teach us to take and keep and use this precious word of Thine:  ‘All things whatsoever ye ask, believe that ye have received.’  Blessed Jesus! it is Thy self in whom our faith must be rooted if it is to grow strong.  Thy work has freed us wholly from the power of sin, and opened the way to the Father; Thy Love is ever longing to bring us into the full fellowship of Thy glory and power; Thy Spirit is ever drawing us upward into a life of perfect faith and confidence; we are assured that in Thy teaching we shall learn to pray the prayer of faith.  Thou wilt train us to pray so that we believe that we receive, to believe that we really have what we ask.  Lord! teach me so to know and trust and love Thee, so to live and abide in Thee, that all my prayers rise up and come before God in Thee, and that my soul may have in Thee the assurance that I am heard.  Amen.

12 - Twelfth Lesson. 'Have faith in God;' Or, The Secret of Believing Prayer

Andrew Murray

TWELFTH LESSON.

‘Have faith in God;’

Or,    The Secret of Believing Prayer.

 

‘Jesus, answering, said unto them, Have faith in God.  Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what He saith cometh to pass; he shall have it.  Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them.’—Mark xi. 22-24.

 

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THE promise of answer to prayer which formed our yesterday’s lesson is one of the most wonderful in all Scripture.  In how many hearts it has raised the question:  How ever can I attain the faith that knows that it receives all it asks?

It is this question our Lord would answer today.  Ere He gave that wonderful promise to His disciples, He spoke another word, in which He points out where the faith in the answer to prayer takes its rise, and ever finds its strength.  HAVE FAITH IN GOD:  this word precedes the other, Have faith in the promise of an answer to prayer.  The power to believe a promise depends entirely, but only, on faith in the promiser.  Trust in the person begets trust in his word.  It is 87only where we live and associate with God in personal, loving intercourse, where GOD HIMSELF is all to us, where our whole being is continually opened up and exposed to the mighty influences that are at work where His Holy Presence is revealed, that the capacity will be developed for believing that He gives whatsoever we ask.

This connection between faith in God and faith in His promise will become clear to us if we think what faith really is.  It is often compared to the hand or the mouth, by which we take and appropriate what is offered to us.  But it is of importance that we should understand that faith is also the ear by which I hear what is promised, the eye by which I see what is offered me.  On this the power to take depends.  I must hear the person who gives me the promise:  the very tone of his voice gives me courage to believe.  I must see him:  in the light of his eye and countenance all fear as to my right to take passes away.  The value of the promise depends on the promiser:  it is on my knowledge of what the promiser is that faith in the promise depends.

It is for this reason that Jesus, ere He gives that wonderful prayer-promise, first says, ‘HAVE FAITH IN GOD.’  That is, let thine eye be open to the Living God, and gaze on Him, seeing Him who is Invisible.  It is through the eye that I yield myself to the influence of what is before me; I just allow it to enter, to exert its influence, to leave its impression upon my mind.  So believing God is just looking to God and what He is, allowing Him to reveal His presence, giving Him time and 88yielding the whole being to take in the full impression of what He is as God, the soul opened up to receive and rejoice in the overshadowing of His love.  Yes, faith is the eye to which God shows what He is and does:  through faith the light of His presence and the workings of His mighty power stream into the soul.  As that which I see lives in me, so by faith God lives in me too.

And even so faith is also the ear through which the voice of God is always heard and intercourse with Him kept up.  It is through the Holy Spirit the Father speaks to us; the Son is the Word, the substance of what God says; the Spirit is the living voice.  This the child of God needs to lead and guide him; the secret voice from heaven must teach him, as it taught Jesus, what to say and what to do.  An ear opened towards God, that is, a believing heart waiting on Him, to hear what He says, will hear Him speak.  The words of God will not only be the words of a Book, but, proceeding from the mouth of God, they will be spirit and truth, life and power.  They will bring in deed and living experience what are otherwise only thoughts.  Through this opened ear the soul tarries under the influence of the life and power of God Himself.  As the words I hear enter the mind and dwell and work there, so through faith God enters the heart, and dwells and works there.

When faith now is in full exercise as eye and ear, as the faculty of the soul by which we see and hear God, then it will be able to exercise its full power as hand and mouth, 89by which we appropriate God and His blessing.  The power of reception will depend entirely on the power of spiritual perception.  For this reason Jesus said, ere He gave the promise that God would answer believing prayer:  ‘HAVE FAITH IN GOD.’  Faith is simply surrender:  I yield myself to the impression the tidings I hear make on me.  By faith I yield myself to the living God.  His glory and love fill my heart, and have the mastery over my life.  Faith is fellowship; I give myself up to the influence of the friend who makes me a promise, and become linked to him by it.  And it is when we enter into this living fellowship with God Himself, in a faith that always sees and hears Him, that it becomes easy and natural to believe His promise as to prayer.  Faith in the promise is the fruit of faith in the promiser:  the prayer of faith is rooted in the life of faith.  And in this way the faith that prays effectually is indeed a gift of God.  Not as something that He bestows or infuses at once, but in a far deeper and truer sense, as the blessed disposition or habit of soul which is wrought and grows up in us in a life of intercourse with Him.  Surely for one who knows his Father well, and lives in constant close intercourse with Him, it is a simple thing to believe the promise that He will do the will of His child who lives in union with Himself.

It is because very many of God’s children do not understand this connection between the life of faith and the prayer of faith that their experience of the power of prayer is so limited.  When they desire earnestly to 90obtain an answer from God, they fix their whole heart upon the promise, and try their utmost to grasp that promise in faith.  When they do not succeed, they are ready to give up hope; the promise is true, but it is beyond their power to take hold of it in faith.  Listen to the lesson Jesus teaches us this day:  HAVE FAITH IN GOD, the Living God:  let faith look to God more than the thing promised:  it is His love, His power, His living presence will waken and work the faith.  A physician would say to one asking for some means to get more strength in his arms and hands to seize and hold, that his whole constitution must be built up and strengthened.  So the cure of a feeble faith is alone to be found in the invigoration of our whole spiritual life by intercourse with God.  Learn to believe in God, to take hold of God, to let God take possession of thy life, and it will be easy to take hold of the promise.  He that knows and trusts God finds it easy to trust the promise too.

Just note how distinctly this comes out in the saints of old.  Every special exhibition of the power of faith was the fruit of a special revelation of God.  See it in Abraham:  ‘And the word of the Lord came unto Abram, saying, Fear not, Abram; I am thy shield.  And He brought him forth abroad, and said . . . AND HE BELIEVED THE LORD.’  And later again:  ‘The Lord appeared unto him, and said unto him, I am God Almighty.  And Abram fell on his face, and God talked with him, saying, As for me, behold my covenant is with thee.’  It was the revelation of God Himself that gave the promise 91its living power to enter the heart and work the faith.  Because they knew God, these men of faith could not do anything but trust His promise.  God’s promise will be to us what God Himself is.  It is the man who walks before the Lord, and falls upon his face to listen while the living God speaks to him, who will really receive the promise.  Though we have God’s promises in the Bible, with full liberty to take them, the spiritual power is wanting, except as God Himself speaks them to us.  And He speaks to those who walk and live with Him.  Therefore, HAVE FAITH IN GOD:  let faith be all eye and ear, the surrender to let God make His full impression, and reveal Himself fully in the soul.  Count it one of the chief blessings of prayer to exercise faith in God, as the Living Mighty God who waits to fulfil in us all the good pleasure of His will, and the work of faith with power.  See in Him the God of Love, whose delight it is to bless and impart Himself.  In such worship of faith in God the power will speedily come to believe the promise too:  ‘ALL THINGS WHATSOEVER YE ASK, BELIEVE THAT YE RECEIVE.’  Yes, see that thou dost in faith make God thine own; the promise will be thine too.

Precious lessons that Jesus has to teach us this day.  We seek God’s gifts:  God wants to give us HIMSELF first.  We think of prayer as the power to draw down good gifts from heaven; Jesus as the means to draw ourselves up to God.  We want to stand at the door and cry; Jesus would have us first enter in 92and realize that we are friends and children.  Let us accept the teaching.  Let every experience of the littleness of our faith in prayer urge us first to have and exercise more faith in the living God, and in such faith to yield ourselves to Him.  A heart full of God has power for the prayer of faith.  Faith in God begets faith in the promise, in the promise too of an answer to prayer.

Therefore, child of God, take time, take time, to bow before Him, to wait on Him to reveal Himself.  Take time, and let thy soul in holy awe and worship exercise and express its faith in the Infinite One, and as He imparts Himself and takes possession of thee, the prayer of faith will crown thy faith in God.

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

O my God! I do believe in Thee.  I believe in Thee as the Father, Infinite in Thy Love and Power.  And as the Son, my Redeemer and my Life.  And as the Holy Spirit, Comforter and Guide and Strength.  Three-One God, I have faith in Thee.  I know and am sure that all that Thou art Thou art to me, that all Thou hast promised Thou wilt perform.

Lord Jesus! increase this faith.  Teach me to take time, and wait and worship in the Holy Presence until my faith takes in all there is in my God for me.  Let it see Him as the Fountain of all Life, working with Almighty Strength to accomplish His will on the93 world and in me.  Let it see Him in His love longing to meet and fulfil my desires.  Let it so take possession of my heart and life that through faith God alone may dwell there.  Lord Jesus, help me! with my whole heart would I believe in God.  Let faith in God each moment fill me.

O my Blessed Saviour! how can Thy Church glorify Thee, how can it fulfil that work of intercession through which Thy kingdom must come, unless our whole life be FAITH IN GOD. Blessed Lord! speak Thy Word, ‘HAVE FAITH IN GOD,’ unto the depths of our souls.

13 - Thirteenth Lesson. 'Prayer and fasting;' Or, The Cure of Unbelief

Andrew Murray

THIRTEENTH LESSON.

‘Prayer and fasting;’

Or,    The Cure of Unbelief.

 

  ‘Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out?  And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief:  for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, nothing shall be impossible to you.  Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting’—Matt. xvii. 19-21.

 

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WHEN the disciples saw Jesus cast the evil spirit out of the epileptic whom ‘they could not cure,’ they asked the Master for the cause of their failure.  He had given them ‘power and authority over all devils, and to cure all diseases.’  They had often exercised that power, and joyfully told how the devils were subject to them.  And yet now, while He was on the Mount, they had utterly failed.  That there had been nothing in the will of God or in the nature of the case to render deliverance impossible, had been proved:  at Christ’s bidding the evil spirit had gone out.  From their expression, ‘Why could we not?’ it is evident that they had wished and sought to do so; they had probably used the Master’s name, and 95called upon the evil spirit to go out.  Their efforts had been vain, and in presence of the multitude, they had been put to shame.  ‘Why could we not?’

Christ’s answer was direct and plain:  ‘Because of your unbelief.’  The cause of His success and their failure, was not owing to His having a special power to which they had no access.  No; the reason was not far to seek.  He had so often taught them that there is one power, that of faith, to which, in the kingdom of darkness, as in the kingdom of God, everything must bow; in the spiritual world failure has but one cause, the want of faith.  Faith is the one condition on which all Divine power can enter into man and work through him.  It is the susceptibility of the unseen:  man’s will yielded up to, and moulded by, the will of God.  The power they had received to cast out devils, they did not hold in themselves as a permanent gift or possession; the power was in Christ, to be received, and held, and used by faith alone, living faith in Himself.  Had they been full of faith in Him as Lord and Conqueror in the spirit-world, had they been full of faith in Him as having given them authority to cast out in His name, this faith would have given them the victory.  ‘Because of your unbelief’ was, for all time, the Master’s explanation and reproof of impotence and failure in His Church.

But such want of faith must have a cause too.  Well might the disciples have asked:  ‘And why could we not believe?  Our faith has cast out devils before this:  why have we now 96failed in believing?  ‘The Master proceeds to tell them ere they ask:  ‘This kind goeth not out but by fasting and prayer.’  As faith is the simplest, so it is the highest exercise of the spiritual life, where our spirit yields itself in perfect receptivity to God’s Spirit and so is strengthened to its highest activity.  This faith depends entirely upon the state of the spiritual life; only when this is strong and in full health, when the Spirit of God has full sway in our life, is there the power of faith to do its mighty deeds.  And therefore Jesus adds:  ‘Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by fasting and prayer.’  The faith that can overcome such stubborn resistance as you have just seen in this evil spirit, Jesus tells them, is not possible except to men living in very close fellowship with God, and in very special separation from the world—in prayer and fasting.  And so He teaches us two lessons in regard to prayer of deep importance.  The one, that faith needs a life of prayer in which to grow and keep strong.  The other, that prayer needs fasting for its full and perfect development.

Faith needs a life of prayer for its full growth.  In all the different parts of the spiritual life, there is such close union, such unceasing action and re-action, that each may be both cause and effect.  Thus it is with faith.  There can be no true prayer without faith; some measure of faith must precede prayer.  And yet prayer is also the way to more faith; there can be no higher degrees of faith except through much prayer.  This is the lesson Jesus teaches here.  There is nothing needs so much to grow97as our faith.  ‘Your faith groweth exceedingly,’ is said of one Church.  When Jesus spoke the words, ‘According to your faith be it unto you,’ He announced the law of the kingdom, which tells us that all have not equal degrees of faith, that the same person has not always the same degree, and that the measure of faith must always determine the measure of power and of blessing.  If we want to know where and how our faith is to grow, the Master points us to the throne of God.  It is in prayer, in the exercise of the faith I have, in fellowship with the living God, that faith can increase.  Faith can only live by feeding on what is Divine, on God Himself.

It is in the adoring worship of God, the waiting on Him and for Him, the deep silence of soul that yields itself for God to reveal Himself, that the capacity for knowing and trusting God will be developed.  It is as we take His word from the Blessed Book, and bring it to Himself, asking him to speak it to us with His living loving voice, that the power will come fully to believe and receive the word as God’s own word to us.  It is in prayer, in living contact with God in living faith, that faith, the power to trust God, and in that trust, to accept everything He says, to accept every possibility He has offered to our faith will become strong in us.  Many Christians cannot understand what is meant by the much prayer they sometimes hear spoken of:  they can form no conception, nor do they feel the need, of spending hours with God.  But what the Master says, the 98experience of His people has confirmed:  men of strong faith are men of much prayer.

This just brings us back again to the lesson we learned when Jesus, before telling us to believe that we receive what we ask, first said, ‘Have faith in God.’  It is God, the living God, into whom our faith must strike its roots deep and broad; then it will be strong to remove mountains and cast out devils.  ‘If ye have faith, nothing shall be impossible to you.’  Oh! if we do but give ourselves up to the work God has for us in the world, coming into contact with the mountains and the devils there are to be cast away and cast out, we should soon comprehend the need there is of much faith, and of much prayer, as the soil in which alone faith can be cultivated.  Christ Jesus is our life, the life of our faith too.  It is His life in us that makes us strong, and makes us simple to believe.  It is in the dying to self which much prayer implies, in closer union to Jesus, that the spirit of faith will come in power.  Faith needs prayer for its full growth.

And prayer needs fasting for its full growth:  this is the second lesson.  Prayer is the one hand with which we grasp the invisible; fasting, the other, with which we let loose and cast away the visible.  In nothing is man more closely connected with the world of sense than in his need of food, and his enjoyment of it.  It was the fruit, good for food, with which man was tempted and fell in Paradise.  It was with bread to be made of stones that Jesus, when an hungered, was tempted in the wilderness, and in fasting 99that He triumphed.  The body has been redeemed to be a temple of the Holy Spirit; it is in body as well as spirit, it is very specially, Scripture says, in eating and drinking, we are to glorify God.  It is to be feared that there are many Christians to whom this eating to the glory of God has not yet become a spiritual reality.  And the first thought suggested by Jesus’ words in regard to fasting and prayer, is, that it is only in a life of moderation and temperance and self-denial that there will be the heart or the strength to pray much.

But then there is also its more literal meaning.  Sorrow and anxiety cannot eat:  joy celebrates its feasts with eating and drinking.  There may come times of intense desire, when it is strongly felt how the body, with its appetites, lawful though they be, still hinder the spirit in its battle with the powers of darkness, and the need is felt of keeping it under.  We are creatures of the senses:  our mind is helped by what comes to us embodied in concrete form; fasting helps to express, to deepen, and to confirm the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, to sacrifice ourselves, to attain what we seek for the kingdom of God.  And He who accepted the fasting and sacrifice of the Son, knows to value and accept and reward with spiritual power the soul that is thus ready to give up all for Christ and His kingdom.

And then follows a still wider application.  Prayer is the reaching out after God and the unseen; fasting, the100 letting go of all that is of the seen and temporal.  While ordinary Christians imagine that all that is not positively forbidden and sinful is lawful to them, and seek to retain as much as possible of this world, with its property, its literature, its enjoyments, the truly consecrated soul is as the soldier who carries only what he needs for the warfare.  Laying aside every weight, as well as the easily besetting sin, afraid of entangling himself with the affairs of this life, he seeks to lead a Nazarite life, as one specially set apart for the Lord and His service.  Without such voluntary separation, even from what is lawful, no one will attain power in prayer:  this kind goeth not out but by fasting and prayer.

Disciples of Jesus! who have asked the Master to teach you to pray, come now and accept His lessons.  He tells you that prayer is the path to faith, strong faith, that can cast out devils.  He tells you:  ‘If ye have faith, nothing shall be impossible to you;’ let this glorious promise encourage you to pray much.  Is the prize not worth the price?  Shall we not give up all to follow Jesus in the path He opens to us here; shall we not, if need be, fast?  Shall we not do anything that neither the body nor the world around hinder us in our great life-work,—having intercourse with our God in prayer, that we may become men of faith, whom He can use in His work of saving the world.

 

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

101

O Lord Jesus! how continually Thou hast to reprove us for our unbelief!  How strange it must appear to Thee, this terrible incapacity of trusting our Father and His promises.  Lord! let Thy reproof, with its searching, ‘Because of your unbelief,’ sink into the very depths of our hearts, and reveal to us how much of the sin and suffering around us is our blame.  And then teach us, Blessed Lord, that there is a place where faith can be learned and gained,—even in the prayer and fasting that brings into living and abiding fellowship with Thyself and the Father.

O Saviour! Thou Thyself art the Author and the Perfecter of our faith; teach us what it is to let Thee live in us by Thy Holy Spirit.  Lord! our efforts and prayers for grace to believe have been so unavailing.  We know why it was:  we sought for strength in ourselves to be given from Thee.  Holy Jesus! do at length teach us the mystery of Thy life in us, and how Thou, by Thy Spirit, dost undertake to live in us the life of faith, to see to it that our faith shall not fail.  O let us see that our faith will just be a part of that wonderful prayer-life which Thou givest in them who expect their training for the ministry of intercession, not in word and thought only, but in the Holy Unction Thou givest, the inflowing of the Spirit of Thine own life.  And teach us how, in fasting and prayer, we may grow up to the faith to which nothing shall be impossible.  Amen.

 

NOTE

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At the time when Blumhardt was passing through his terrible conflict with the evil spirits in those who were possessed, and seeking to cast them out by prayer, he often wondered what it was that hindered the answer.  One day a friend, to whom he had spoken of his trouble, directed his attention to our Lord’s words about fasting.  Blumhardt resolved to give himself to fasting, sometimes for more than thirty hours.  From reflection and experience he gained the conviction that it is of more importance than is generally thought.  He says, ‘Inasmuch as the fasting is before God, a practical proof that the thing we ask is to us a matter of true and pressing interest, and inasmuch as in a high degree it strengthens the intensity and power of the prayer, and becomes the unceasing practical expression of a prayer without words, I could believe that it would not be without efficacy, especially as the Master’s words had reference to a case like the present.  I tried it, without telling any one, and in truth the later conflict was extraordinarily lightened by it.  I could speak with much greater restfulness and decision.  I did not require to be so long present with the sick one; and I felt that I could influence without being present.’

14 - Fourteenth Lesson. 'When ye stand praying, forgive;' Or, Prayer and Love

Andrew Murray

FOURTEENTH LESSON.

‘When ye stand praying, forgive;’

Or,          Prayer and Love.

 

‘And whensoever ye stand praying, forgive,  if ye have aught against any one; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.’—Mark xi. 25.

 

103

THESE words follow immediately on the great prayer-promise, ‘All things whatsoever ye pray, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them.’  We have already seen how the words that preceded that promise, ‘Have faith in God,’ taught us that in prayer all depends upon our relation to God being clear; these words that follow on it remind us that our relation with fellow-men must be clear too.  Love to God and love to our neighbour are inseparable:  the prayer from a heart, that is either not right with God on the one side, or with men on the other, cannot prevail.  Faith and love are essential to each other.

We find that this is a thought to which our Lord frequently gave expression.  In the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. v. 23, 24), when speaking of104 the sixth commandment, He taught His disciples how impossible acceptable worship to the Father was if everything were not right with the brother:  ‘If thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.’  And so later, when speaking of prayer to God, after having taught us to pray, ‘Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors,’ He added at the close of the prayer:  ‘If you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’  At the close of the parable of the unmerciful servant He applies His teaching in the words:  ‘So shall also my Heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts.’  And so here, beside the dried-up fig-tree, where He speaks of the wonderful power of faith and the prayer of faith, He all at once, apparently without connection, introduces the thought, ‘Whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any one; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.’  It is as if the Lord had learned during His life at Nazareth and afterwards that disobedience to the law of love to men was the great sin even of praying people, and the great cause of the feebleness of their prayer.  And it is as if He wanted to lead us into His own blessed experience that nothing gives such liberty of access and such power in believing as the consciousness 105that we have given ourselves in love and compassion, for those whom God loves.

The first lesson taught here is that of a forgiving disposition.  We pray, ‘Forgive, even as we have forgiven.’  Scripture says, ‘Forgive one another, even as God also in Christ forgave you.’  God’s full and free forgiveness is to be the rule of ours with men.  Otherwise our reluctant, half-hearted forgiveness, which is not forgiveness at all, will be God’s rule with us.   Every prayer rests upon our faith in God’s pardoning grace.  If God dealt with us after our sins, not one prayer could be heard.  Pardon opens the door to all God’s love and blessing:  because God has pardoned all our sin, our prayer can prevail to obtain all we need.  The deep sure ground of answer to prayer is God’s forgiving love.  When it has taken possession of the heart, we pray in faith.  But also, when it has taken possession of the heart, we live in love.  God’s forgiving disposition, revealed in His love to us, becomes a disposition in us; as the power of His forgiving love shed abroad and dwelling within us, we forgive even as He forgives.  If there be great and grievous injury or injustice done us, we seek first of all to possess a Godlike disposition; to be kept from a sense of wounded honour, from a desire to maintain our rights, or from rewarding the offender as he has deserved.  In the little annoyances of daily life, we are watchful not to excuse the hasty temper, the sharp word, the quick judgment, with the thought that we mean no harm, that we do not keep 106the anger long, or that it would be too much to expect from feeble human nature, that we should really forgive the way God and Christ do.  No, we take the command literally, ‘Even as Christ forgave, so also do ye.’  The blood that cleanses the conscience from dead works, cleanses from selfishness too; the love it reveals is pardoning love, that takes possession of us and flows through us to others.  Our forgiving love to men is the evidence of the reality of God’s forgiving love in us, and so the condition of the prayer of faith.

There is a second, more general lesson:  our daily life in the world is made the test of our intercourse with God in prayer.  How often the Christian, when he comes to pray, does his utmost to cultivate certain frames of mind which he thinks will be pleasing.  He does not understand, or forgets, that life does not consist of so many loose pieces, of which now the one, then the other, can be taken up.  Life is a whole, and the pious frame of the hour of prayer is judged of by God from the ordinary frame of the daily life of which the hour of prayer is but a small part.  Not the feeling I call up, but the tone of my life during the day, is God’s criterion of what I really am and desire.  My drawing nigh to God is of one piece with my intercourse with men and earth:  failure here will cause failure there.  And that not only when there is the distinct consciousness of anything wrong between my neighbour and myself; but the ordinary current of my thinking and judging, the unloving thoughts and words I 107allow to pass unnoticed, can hinder my prayer.  The effectual prayer of faith comes out from a life given up to the will and the love of God.  Not according to what I try to be when praying, but what I am when not praying, is my prayer dealt with by God.

We may gather these thoughts into a third lesson:  In our life with men the one thing on which everything depends is love.  The spirit of forgiveness is the spirit of love.  Because God is love, He forgives:  it is only when we are dwelling in love that we can forgive as God forgives.   In love to the brethren we have the evidence of love to the Father, the ground of confidence before God, and the assurance that our prayer will be heard, (1 John iv. 20, iii. 18-21, 23.).  ‘Let us love in deed and truth; herebyshall we assure our heart before Him.  If our heart condemn us not, we have boldness toward God, and whatever we ask, we receive of Him.’  Neither faith nor work will profit if we have not love; it is love that unites with God, it is love that proves the reality of faith.  As essential as in the word that precedes the great prayer-promise in Mark xi. 24, ‘Have faith in God,’ is this one that follows it, ‘Have love to men.’  The right relations to the living God above me, and the living men around me, are the conditions of effectual prayer.

This love is of special consequence when we labour for such and pray for them.  We sometimes give ourselves to work for Christ, from zeal 108for His cause, as we call it, or for our own spiritual health, without giving ourselves in personal self-sacrificing love for those whose souls we seek.  No wonder that our faith is feeble and does not conquer.  To look on each wretched one, however unloveable he be, in the light of the tender love of Jesus the Shepherd seeking the lost; to see Jesus Christ in him, and to take him up, for Jesus’ sake, in a heart that really loves, —this, this is the secret of believing prayer and successful effort.  Jesus, in speaking of forgiveness, speaks of love as its root.  Just as in the Sermon on the Mount He connected His teaching and promises about prayer with the call to be merciful, as the Father in heaven is merciful (Matt. v. 7, 9, 22, 38-48), so we see it here:  a loving life is the condition of believing prayer.

It has been said:  There is nothing so heart-searching as believing prayer, or even the honest effort to pray in faith.  O let us not turn the edge of that self-examination by the thought that God does not hear our prayer for reasons known to Himself alone.  By no means.  ‘Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss.’  Let that word of God search us.  Let us ask whether our prayer be indeed the expression of a life wholly given over to the will of God and the love of man.  Love is the only soil in which faith can strike its roots and thrive.  As it throws its arms up, and opens its heart heavenward, the Father always looks to see if it has them opened 109towards the evil and the unworthy too.  In that love, not indeed the love of perfect attainment, but the love of fixed purpose and sincere obedience, faith can alone obtain the blessing.  It is he who gives himself to let the love of God dwell in him, and in the practice of daily life to love as God loves, who will have the power to believe in the Love that hears his every prayer.  It is the Lamb, who is in the midst of the throne:  it is suffering and forbearing love that prevails with God in prayer.  The merciful shall obtain mercy; the meek shall inherit the earth.

 

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

——0——

 

Blessed Father!  Thou art Love, and only he that abideth in love abideth in Thee and in fellowship with Thee.  The Blessed Son hath this day again taught me how deeply true this is of my fellowship with Thee in prayer.  O my God! let Thy love, shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Spirit, be in me a fountain of love to all around me, that out of a life in love may spring the power of believing prayer.  O my Father! grant by the Holy Spirit that this may be my experience, that a life in love to all around me is the gate to a life in the love of my God.  And give me especially to find in the joy with which I forgive day by day whoever might offend me, the proof that Thy forgiveness to me is a power and a life.

Lord Jesus! my Blessed Teacher! teach Thou 110me to forgive and to love.  Let the power of Thy blood make the pardon of my sins such a reality, that forgiveness, as shown by Thee to me, and by me to others, may be the very joy of heaven.  Show me whatever in my intercourse with fellowmen might hinder my fellowship with God, so that my daily life in my own home and in society may be the school in which strength and confidence are gathered for the prayer of faith.   Amen.

15 - Fifteenth Lesson. 'If two agree;' Or, The Power of United Prayer

Andrew Murray

FIFTEENTH LESSON.

‘If two agree;’

Or,    The Power of United Prayer

 

‘Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.  For where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I in the midst of them.—Matt. xviii. 19, 20.

 

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ONE of the first lessons of our Lord in His school of prayer was:  Not to be seen of men.  Enter thy inner chamber; be alone with the Father.  When He has thus taught us that the meaning of prayer is personal individual contact with God, He comeswith a second lesson:  You have need not only of secret solitary, but also of public united prayer.  And He gives us a very special promise for the united prayer of two or three who agree in what they ask.  As a tree has its root hidden in the ground and its stem growing up into the sunlight, so prayer needs equally for its full development the hidden secrecy in which the soul meets God alone, and the public fellowship with those who find in the name of Jesus their common meeting-place.

112The reason why this must be so is plain.  The bond that unites a man to his fellow-men is no less real and close than that which unites him to God:  he is one with them.  Grace renews not alone our relation to God but to man too.  We not only learn to say ‘My Father,’ but ‘Our Father.’  Nothing would be more unnatural than that the children of a family should always meet their father separately, but never in the united expression of their desires or their love.  Believers are not only members of one family, but even of one body.  Just as each member of the body depends on the other, and the full action of the spirit dwelling in the body depends on the union and co-operation of all, so Christians cannot reach the full blessing God is ready to bestow through His Spirit, but as they seek and receive it in fellowship with each other.  It is in the union and fellowship of believers that the Spirit can manifest His full power.  It was to the hundred and twenty continuing in one place together, and praying with one accord, that the Spirit came from the throne of the glorified Lord.

The marks of true united prayer are given us in these words of our Lord.  The first is agreement as to the thing asked.  There must not only be generally the consent to agree with anything another may ask:  there must be some special thing, matter of distinct united desire; the agreement must be, as all prayer, in spirit and in truth.  In such agreement it will become very clear to us what exactly we are asking, whether we may confidently 113ask according to God’s will, and whether we are ready to believe that we have received what we ask.

The second mark is the gathering in, or into, the Name of Jesus.  We shall afterwards have much more to learn of the need and the power of the Name of Jesus in prayer; here our Lord teaches us that the Name must be the centre of union to which believers gather, the bond of union that makes them one, just as a home contains and unites all who are in it.  ‘The Name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous runneth into it and escape.’  That Name is such a reality to those who understand and believe it, that to meet within it is to have Himself present.  The love and unity of His disciples have to Jesus infinite attraction:  ‘Where two or three are gathered in my Name, there am I in the midst of them.’  It is the living presence of Jesus, in the fellowship of His loving praying disciples, that gives united prayer its power.

The third mark is, the sure answer:  ‘It shall be done for them of my Father.’  A prayer-meeting for maintaining religious fellowship, or seeking our own edification, may have its use; this was not the Saviour’s view in its appointment.  He meant it as a means of securing special answer to prayer.  A prayer meeting without recognised answer to prayer ought to be an anomaly.  When any of us have distinct desires in regard to which we feel too weak to exercise the needful faith, we ought to seek strength in the help of other.  In the unity of faith and of 114love and of the Spirit, the power of the Name and the Presence of Jesus acts more freely and the answer comes more surely.  The mark that there has been true united prayer is the fruit, the answer, the receiving of the thing we have asked:  ‘I say unto you, It shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.’

What an unspeakable privilege this of united prayer is, and what a power it might be.  If the believing husband and wife knew that they were joined together in the Name of Jesus to experience His presence and power in united prayer (1 Peter); if friends believed what mighty help two or three praying in concert could give each other; if in every prayer meeting the coming together in the Name, the faith in the Presence, and the expectation of the answer, stood in the foreground; if in every Church united effectual prayer were regarded as one of the chief purposes for which they are banded together, the highest exercise of their power as a Church; if in the Church universal the coming of the kingdom, the coming of the King Himself, first in the mighty outpouring of His Holy Spirit, then in His own glorious person, were really matter of unceasing united crying to God;—O who can say what blessing might come to, and through, those who thus agreed to prove God in the fulfilment of His promise.

In the Apostle Paul we see very distinctly what a reality his faith in the power of united prayer was.  To the Romans he writes (xv. 30):  ‘I beseech you, brethren,115by the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayer to God for me.’  He expects in answer to be delivered from his enemies, and to be prospered in his work.  To the Corinthians (2 Cor. i. 11), ‘God will still deliver us, ye also helping together on our behalf by your supplications;’ their prayer is to have a real share in his deliverance.  To the Ephesians he writes:  ‘With all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit for all the saints and on my behalf, that utterance may be given unto me.’  His power and success in his ministry he makes to depend on their prayers.  With the Philippians (i. 19) he expects that his trials will turn to his salvation and the progress of the gospel ‘through your supplications and  the supply of the spirit of Jesus Christ.;  To the Colossians (iv. 3) he adds to the injunction to continue stedfast in prayer:  ‘Withal praying for us too, that God may open unto us a door for the word.’  And to the Thessalonians (2 Thess. iii. 1) he writes:  ‘Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may run and be glorified, and that we may be delivered from unreasonable men.’  It is everywhere evident that Paul felt himself the member of a body, on the sympathy and co-operation of which he was dependent, and that he counted on the prayers of these Churches to gain for him, what otherwise might not be given.  The prayers of the Church were to him as real a factor in the work of the kingdom, as the power of God.

Who can say 116what power a Church could develop and exercise, if it gave itself to the work of prayer day and night for the coming of the kingdom, for God’s power on His servants and His word, for the glorifying of God in the salvation of souls?  Most Churches think their members are gathered into one simply to take care of and build up each other.  They know not that God rules the world by the prayers of His saints; that prayer is the power by which Satan is conquered; that by prayer the Church on earth has disposal of the powers of the heavenly world.  They do not remember that Jesus has, by His promise, consecrated every assembly in His Name to be a gate of heaven, where His Presence is to be felt, and His Power experienced in the Father fulfilling their desires.

We cannot sufficiently thank God for the blessed week of united prayer, with which Christendom in our days opens every year.  As proof of our unity and our faith in the power of united prayer, as a training-school for the enlargement of our hearts to take in all the needs of the Church universal, as a help to united persevering prayer, it is of unspeakable value.  But very specially as a stimulus to continued union in prayer in the smaller circles, its blessing has been great.  And it will become even greater, as God’s people recognise what it is, all to meet as one in the Name of Jesus to have His presence in the midst of a body all united in the Holy Spirit, and boldly to claim the promise that it shall be done of the 117Father what they agree to ask.

 

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY’

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Blessed Lord! who didst in Thy high-priestly prayer ask so earnestly for the unity of Thy people, teach us how Thou dost invite and urge us to this unity by Thy precious promise given to united prayer.  It is when we are one in love and desire that our faith has Thy presence and the Father’s answer.

O Father! we pray for Thy people, and for every smaller circle of those who meet together, that they may be one.  Remove, we pray, all selfishness and self-interest, all narrowness of heart and estrangement, by which that unity is hindered.  Cast out the spirit of the world and the flesh, through which Thy promise loses all its power.  O let the thought of Thy presence and the Father’s favour draw us all nearer to each other.

Grant especially Blessed Lord, that Thy Church may believe that it is by the power of united prayer that she can bind and loose in heaven; that Satan can be cast out; that souls can be saved; that mountains can be removed; that the kingdom can be hastened.  And grant, good Lord! that in the circle with which I pray, the prayer of the Church may indeed be the power through which Thy Name and Word are glorified.  Amen.

16 - Sixteenth Lesson. 'Speedily, through bearing long;' Or, The Power of Persevering Prayer

Andrew Murray

SIXTEENTH LESSON.

‘Speedily, though bearing long;’

Or,    The Power of Persevering Prayer.

 

‘And He spake a parable unto them to the end that they ought always to pray, and not to faint. . . . And the Lord said, Hear what the unrighteous judge saith.  And shall not God avenge His own elect, which cry to Him day and night, and He is long-suffering over them?  I say unto you, that He will avenge them speedily.’—Luke xviii. 108.

 

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OF all the mysteries of the prayer world, the need of persevering prayer is one of the greatest.  That the Lord, who is so loving and longing to bless, should have to be supplicated time after time, sometimes year after year, before the answer comes, we cannot easily understand.  It is also one of the greatest practical difficulties in the exercise of believing prayer.  When, after persevering supplication, our prayer remains unanswered, it is often easiest for our slothful flesh, and it has all the appearance of pious submission, to think that we must now cease praying, because God may have His secret reason for withholding His answer to our request.

It is by faith alone 119that the difficulty is overcome.  When once faith has taken its stand upon God’s word, and the Name of Jesus, and has yielded itself to the leading of the Spirit to seek God’s will and honour alone in its prayer, it need not be discouraged by delay.  It knows from Scripture that the power of believing prayer is simply irresistible; real faith can never be disappointed.  It knows how, just as water, to exercise the irresistible power it can have, must be gathered up and accumulated, until the stream can come down in full force, there must often be a heaping up of prayer, until God sees that the measure is full, and the answer comes.  It knows how, just as the ploughman has to take his ten thousand steps, and sow his ten thousand seeds, each one a part of the preparation for the final harvest, so there is a need-be for oft-repeated persevering prayer, all working out some desired blessing.  It knows for certain that not a single believing prayer can fail of its effect in heaven, but has its influence, and is treasured up to work out an answer in due time to him who persevereth to the end.  It knows that it has to do not with human thoughts or possibilities, but with the word of the living God.  And so even as Abraham through so many years ‘in hope believed against hope,’ and then ‘through faith and patience inherited the promise,’ it counts that the long-suffering of the Lord is salvation, waiting and hasting unto the coming of its Lord to fulfil His promise.

To enable us, when the 120answer to our prayer does not come at once, to combine quiet patience and joyful confidence in our persevering prayer, we must specially try to understand the two words in which our Lord sets forth the character and conduct, not of the unjust judge, but of our God and Father towards those whom He allows to cry day and night to Him:  ‘He is long-suffering over them; He will avenge them speedily.’

He will avenge them speedily, the Master says.  The blessing is all prepared; He is not only willing but most anxious to give them what they ask; everlasting love burns with the longing desire to reveal itself fully to its beloved, and to satisfy their needs.  God will not delay one moment longer than is absolutely necessary; He will do all in His power to hasten and speed the answer.

But why, if this be true and His power be infinite, does it often last so long with the answer to prayer?  And why must God’s own elect so often, in the midst of suffering and conflict, cry day and night?  ‘He is  long-suffering over them.’  ‘Behold! the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, being long-suffering over it, till it receive the early and the latter rain.’  The husbandman does indeed long for his harvest, but knows that it must have its full time of sunshine and rain, and has long patience.  A child so often wants to pick the half-ripe fruit; the husbandman knows to wait till the proper time.  Man, in his spiritual nature too, is under the law of gradual growth that reigns in all 121created life.  It is only in the path of development that he can reach his divine destiny.  And it is the Father, in whose hands are the times and seasons, who alone knows the moment when the soul or the Church is ripened to that fulness of faith in which it can really take and keep the blessing.  As a father who longs to have his only child home from school, and yet waits patiently till the time of training is completed, so it is with God and His children:  He is the long-suffering One, and answers speedily.

The insight into this truth leads the believer to cultivate the corresponding dispositions:  patience and faith, waiting and hasting, are the secret of his perseverance.  By faith in the promise of God, we know that we have the petitions we have asked of Him.  Faith takes and holds the answer in the promise, as an unseen spiritual possession, rejoices in it, and praises for it.  But there is a difference between the faith that thus holds the word and knows that it has the answer, and the clearer, fuller, riper faith that obtains the promise as a present experience.  It is in persevering, not unbelieving, but confident and praising prayer, that the soul grows up into that full union with its Lord in which it can enter upon the possession of the blessing in Him.  There may be in these around us, there may be in that great system of being of which we are part, there may be in God’s government, things that have to be put right through our prayer, ere the answer can fully come:  the faith that has, according to122the command, believed that it has received, can allow God to take His time:  it knows it has prevailed and must prevail.  In quiet, persistent, and determined perseverance it continues in prayer and thanksgiving until the blessing come.  And so we see combined what at first sight appears so contradictory; the faith that rejoices in the answer of the unseen God as a present possession, with the patience that cries day and night until it be revealed.  The speedily of God’s long-suffering is met by the triumphant but patient faith of His waiting child.

Our great danger in this school of the answer delayed, is the temptation to think that, after all, it may not be God’s will to give us what we ask.  If our prayer be according to God’s word, and under the leading of the Spirit, let us not give way to these fears.  Let us learn to give God time.  God needs time with us.  If we only give Him time, that is, time in the daily fellowship with Himself, for Him to exercise the full influence of His presence on us, and time, day by day, in the course of our being kept waiting, for faith to prove its reality and to fill our whole being, He Himself will lead us from faith to vision; we shall see the glory of God.  Let no delay shake our faith.  Of faith it holds good:  first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.  Each believing prayer brings a step nearer the final victory.  Each believing prayer helps to ripen the fruit and bring us nearer to it; it fills up the measure of prayer and faith known to God alone; it 123conquers the hindrances in the unseen world; it hastens the end.  Child of God! give the Father time.  He is long-suffering over you.  He wants the blessing to be rich, and full, and sure; give Him time, while you cry day and night.  Only remember the word:  ‘I say unto you, He will avenge them speedily.’

The blessing of such persevering prayer is unspeakable.  There is nothing so heart-searching as the prayer of faith.  It teaches you to discover and confess, and give up everything that hinders the coming of the blessing; everything there may be not in accordance with the Father’s will.  It leads to closer fellowship with Him who alone can teach to pray, to a more entire surrender to draw nigh under no covering but that of the blood, and the Spirit.  It calls to a closer and more simple abiding in Christ alone.  Christian! give God time.  He will perfect that which concerneth you.  ‘Long-suffering—speedily,’ this is God’s watchword as you enter the gates of prayer:  be it yours too.

Let it be thus whether you pray for yourself, or for others.  All labour, bodily or mental, needs time and effort:  we must give up ourselves to it.  Nature discovers her secrets and yields her treasures only to diligent and thoughtful labour.  However little we can understand it, in the spiritual husbandry it is the same:  the seed we sow in the soil of heaven, the efforts we put forth, and the influence we seek 124to exert in the world above, need our whole being:  we must give ourselves to prayer.  But let us hold fast the great confidence, that in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

And let us specially learn the lesson as we pray for the Church of Christ.  She is indeed as the poor widow, in the absence of her Lord, apparently at the mercy of her adversary, helpless to obtain redress.  Let us, when we pray for His Church or any portion of it, under the power of the world, asking Him to visit her with the mighty workings of His Spirit and to prepare her for His coming, let us pray in the assured faith:  prayer does help, praying always and not fainting will bring the answer.  Only give God time.  And then keep crying day and night.  ‘Hear what the unrighteous judge saith.  And shall not God avenge His own elect, which cry to Him day and night, and He is long-suffering over them.  I say unto you, He will avenge them speedily.’

 

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

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O Lord my God!  teach me now to know Thy way, and in faith to apprehend what Thy Beloved Son has taught:  ‘He will avenge them speedily.’  Let Thy tender love, and the delight Thou hast in hearing and blessing Thy children, lead me implicitly to accept Thy promise, that we receive what we believe, that we have the petitions we ask, and that the answer will in due time be seen.  Lord! we understand the125 seasons in nature, and know to wait with patience for the fruit we long for—O fill us with the assurance that not one moment longer than is needed wilt Thou delay, and that faith will hasten the answer.

Blessed Master! Thou hast said that it is a sign of God’s elect that they cry day and night.  O teach us to understand this.  Thou knowest how speedily we grow faint and weary.  It is as if the Divine Majesty is so much beyond the need or the reach of continued supplication, that it does not become us to be too importunate.  O Lord! do teach me how real the labour of prayer is.  I know how here on earth, when I have failed in an undertaking, I can often succeed by renewed and more continuing effort, by giving more time and thought:  show me how, by giving myself more entirely to prayer, to live in prayer, I shall obtain what I ask.  And above all, O my blessed Teacher! Author and perfecter of faith, let by Thy grace my whole life be one of faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me—in whom my prayer gains acceptance, in whom I have the assurance of the answer, in whom the answer will be mine.  Lord Jesus! in this faith I will pray always and not faint.  Amen.

 

NOTE

 

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The need of persevering importunate prayer appears to some to be at variance with the faith which knows that it has received what it asks (Mark xi. 24).  One of the mysteries of the Divine life is the harmony between the gradual and the sudden, immediate full possession, and slow imperfect appropriation.  And so here persevering prayer appears to be the school in which the soul is strengthened for the boldness of faith.  And with the diversity of operations of the Spirit there may be some in whom faith takes more the form of persistent waiting; while to others, triumphant thanksgiving appears the only proper expressions of the assurance of having been heard.

In a remarkable way the need of persevering prayer, and the gradual rising into greater ease in obtaining answer, is illustrated in the life of Blumhardt.  Complaints had been lodged against him of neglecting his work as a minister of the gospel, and devoting himself to the healing of the sick; and especially his unauthorized healing of the sick belonging to other congregations.  In his defense he writes:  ‘I simply ventured to do what becomes one who has the charge of souls, and to pray according to the command of the Lord in James i. 6, 7.  In no way did I trust to my own power, or imagine that I had any gift that others had not.  But this is true, I set myself to the work as a minister of the gospel, who has a right to pray.  But I speedily discovered that the gates of heaven were not fully opened to me.  Often I was inclined to retire in despair.  But the sight of the sick ones, who could find help nowhere, gave me no rest.  I thought of the word of the Lord:  “Ask, and it shall be given you” (Luke xi. 9, 10).  And farther, I thought that if the Church and her ministers had, through unbelief, sloth, and disobedience lost what was needed for overcoming of the power of 127Satan, it was just for such times of leanness and famine that the Lord had spoken the parable of the friend at midnight and his three loaves.  I felt that I was not worthy thus at midnight, in a time of great darkness, to appear before God as His friend and ask for a member of my congregation what he needed.  And yet, to leave him uncared for, I could not either.  And so I kept knocking, as the parable directs, or, as some have said, with great presumption and tempting God.  Be this as it may, I could not leave my guest unprovided.  At this time the parable of the widow became very precious to me.  I saw that the Church was the widow, and I was a minister of the Church.  I had the right to be her mouthpiece against the adversary; but for a long time the Lord would not.  I asked nothing more than the three loaves; what I needed for my guest.  At last the Lord listened to the importunate beggar, and helped me.  Was it wrong of me to pray thus?  The two parables must surely be applicable somewhere, and where was greater need to be conceived?

And what was the fruit of my prayer?  The friend who was at first unwilling, did not say, Go now; I will myself give to your friend what he needs; I do not require you; but gave it to me as His friend, to give to my guest.  And so I used the three loaves, and had to spare.  But the supply was small, and new guests came; because they saw I had a heart to help them, and that I would take the trouble even at midnight to go to my friend.  When I asked for them, too, I got the needful again, and there was again to spare.  How could I help that the needy continually came to my house?  Was I to harden myself, and say, Why do you come to me?  there are large and better homes in the city, go there.  Their answer was, Dear sir, we cannot go there.  We have been there:  they were very sorry to send us away so hungry, but they could not undertake to go and ask a friend for what we wanted.  Do go, and get us bread for we suffer 128great pain.  What could I do?  They spoke the truth, and their suffering touched my heart.  However much labour it cost me, I went each time again, and got the three loaves.  Often I got what I asked much quicker than at first, and also much more abundantly.  But all did not care for this bread, so some left my home hungry.’1

In his first struggles with the evil spirits, it took him more than eighteen months of prayer and labour before the final victory was gained.  Afterwards he had such ease of access to the throne, and stood in such close communication with the unseen world, that often, with letters came asking prayer for sick people, he could, after just looking upward for a single moment, obtain the answer as to whether they would be healed.

1From Johann Christophe Blumhardt, Ein Lebenabild von F. Etindel.